


"^. ,-^ 









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^_^/r??^ 



THE COMPLETE WORFCS 



JULES VERNE, 



TRANSLATED BY 



EDWARD ROTH, 



THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 




THE INTERIOR OF THE PROJECTILE. 



THE 



Baltimore Gun Club 



FROM THE FRENCH OF 



JULES VERNE 



FREELY TRANSLATED BY 



EDWARD ROTH 



(FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON.) 



PHILADELPHIA 

KING & BAIRD, Publishers 
607 Sansom Street 



PZ3 

■ Vsq - 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by 

EDWARD ROTH. 

In the Office of the Librarian at Washington. 



V 

^ug. 13,1929 



^^^ y cmlj 



King & Baird, Printers and Stereotypers, 

Nos. 601 antJ 609 <Sansom Street, 

PHILADELPHIA. 



JOHN J. MCELHONE, Esq., 

OF WASHINGTON, 

A GENTLEMAN WHOM I AM PROUD TO CALL 

MY FRIEND, 

THIS ENGLISH EDITION OF 

JULES VERNE'S WORKS, 

IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED BY 

EDWARD ROTH. 
Philadelphia, May, 1874. 



PREFACE. 



Six years ago Verne's wonderful stories, among others 
his De la T^erre a la Lune, fairly fascinated me. The 
boldness of the conceptions, the naturalness of the inci- 
dents, the details founded on the strictest practical knowl- 
edge, the liveliness of the narrative, the clearness of the 
thought — all revealing a mind that had sounded the depths 
of many an intricate scientific problem — were indeed a new 
revelation. Not only that. The elements usually con- 
sidered indispensable in the ordinary novel, were totally 
absent. There was no killing, no betraying, no persecu- 
tion, no heart breaking, no courtly pageantry, no meta- 
physical speculations, no mystery, no complicated plot, no 
thrilling descriptions, no fine writing, no photographic 
sketches of real life, no turning the human heart inside out, 
no apotheosis of nastiness — and still the story was pro- 
foundly and absorbingly interesting ! An ideal story, pure 
as a sunbeam, less elaborately constructed than Poe's, but 
like them appealing altogether to the intellect of the reader 
and his innate love of the marvellous. 

Surely, I thought, Verne's are just the books for our 
clear-brained, quick witted, inquisitive, restless, reality lov- 
ing Young America, so different from his brothers in Europe, 
whether plodding Teuton or visionary Celt. 

Our boys, I said, devour dime novels by the millions, for* 
want of something better. They read English reprints, 
written for a lower order of minds, and therefore sure to de- 
prave their tastes if not to corrupt their hearts. They blind 

(3) 



4 PREFACE. 

themselves, physically and morally, over books intended for 
older readers of more vigorous stamina, and therefore less 
liable to irreparable injury. Their school books are irk- 
some and apparently useless, having so little in common 
with the volumes they find lying about at home. 

Would not Verne's stories, I asked, suit them exactly ? 
They treat on healthy manly subjects ; they give the intel- 
lect an exciting but not an enervating stimulus ; they are 
more suggestive of a breezy walk over sunlit mountains 
than the painted gorgeousness of a theatre or the sickening 
perfumes of a ball room ; they present pictures that invest 
studies in geography, chemistry, geology, history, and 
mathematics and physics generally, with a charm that is 
nevei discovered in school books. They inculcate 
earnestness, steadiness, thoughtfulness. When a bright 
eyed, pure hearted boy asks his teacher what book he can 
recommend, he may be answered at once, without any hem- 
ming or hawing. 

Therefore, I fondly concluded, Verne's books are going 
to be immediately translated by enterprising American 
publishers, and scattered by tens of thousands all over the 
land. 

How I reckoned without my host ! 

For five or six years not a single work of Jules Verne 
issued from the American press, except '' Five Weeks in a 
Balloon," which, though in the main a good translation, 
contains so many geographical mistakes that it must have 
been done in a hurry. 

Whence proceeded this indifference of American pub- 
lishers to the Daniel Defoe of the nineteenth century ? 
Was there some radical defect in his stories so great as to 
counterbalance his innumerable merits ? No doubt some 
thought so. Cool heads might consider his conceptions 
rather extravagant, the incidents impossible, his science 
now too profound, now hard to separate from mere 



PRE FA CE, o 

fancy, his local coloring distortion rather than exaggeration, 
his humor too thin to bear translation, his men machines 
rather than human beings, his sentiments odd, his English 
names harsh and even absurd, and his whole book, in fact, 
intended for a cast of mind essentially different from that of 
the ordinary American reader. 

Charges of this nature, whether well or ill founded, seem 
to have completely blinded American publishers for several 
years, with regard to the merits of Jules Verne. 

How little they knew the American public ! 

In spite of the alleged drawbacks, hasty translations of 
Verne's works by English hands, in which, either through 
ignorance, incapacity or prejudice, his errors — sometimes 
merely typographical — were uncorrected, his defects exag- 
gerated, and even some of his best passages omitted — these 
translations, reprinted by American publishers, spread like 
wild fire last year over the country and were everywhere 
hailed with the greatest delight by both young and old. 

Then my resolution was taken. It was to make an origi- 
nal translation, the best I could, of works of such undeni- 
ably inherent merit, a translation which, while strictly fol- 
lowing the spirit of the author — this it could not do if slav- 
ishly bald and literal — would try to make the most of his 
strong points, throw the weak ones into shade, soften off 
extravagances, give the names a familiar sound, correct pal- 
pable errors — unless where radical, and then say nothing 
about them — simplify crabbed science, explain difficulties, 
amplify local coloring, clear up unknown allusions, put a 
little more blood and heart into the human beings — in 
short, a translation which should aim as far as possible at 
that natural, clear, familiar, idiomatic style which Verne 
himself would have used if addressing himself in English to 
an American audience. 

Such services rendered to Jules Verne's stories, if done 
honestly, unobtrusively, and with even tolerable success, could 



6 PRE FA CE, 

hardly, fail to be of decided advantage to the American 
public. 

The present volume is my first instalment. In it the 
reader has Jules Verne done into real English, corrected, 
edited, annotated, revised — 

Improved ? 

Well — I only hope the public may kindly think so. 

E. R. 

Broad Street Academy, 

Philadelphia, A^ril, 1874. 



CONTENTS. 



Chapter. Page. 

I. The Artillerists, 5 

II. The President's Communication, 24 

III. The Effect, 40 

IV. Reply from Cambridge University, 50 

V. The Romance of the Moon, cy 

VI. Which Lady Readers are Requested to Skip, . ^^ 

VII. The Material of the Bullet, yn 

VIII. The Cannon, g-? 

IX. The Powder, IOC 

X. An Enemy, Iiy 

XI. Florida or Texas ? I^I 

XII. The Financial Question, IC2 

XIII. Stony Hill, lyi 

XIV. Spade, Shovel, Pick and Trowei Iq:? 

^ XV. The Casting, 2o8 

XVI. The Big Gun, 2x8 

XVII. By the Atlantic Cable, 24I 

XVill. Who Was He? 243 

XIX, Ardan Defines his Platform, 26^ 

XX. A Fencing Match, 2QO 

XXI. War to the Knife, '2X2 

XXII. Popularity in America, '^''4 

XXIII. An Improvement on Pullman ^^q 

XXIV. The Great Telescope, ^^r 

XXV. Closing Details, 0^2 

XXVI. Fire ! 



XXVII. Cloudy Weather, 
XXViii. A New Star, . 



(7) 



397 
421 

435 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 



Page. 
THE INTERIOR OF THE PROJECTILE, , . . Frontispiece 

MARSTON'S FIRST DRAFT OF THE GUN, 96 

TAMPA PREVIOUS TO THE UNDERTAKING,. ... 1 78 

THE WORK PROGRESSED, .... 203 

TAMPA AFTER THE UNDERTAKING 226 

MAP (SCENE OF THE OPERATIONS), 231 

TRAINS TO THE MOON, 276 

THE CAT RECOVERED, 346 

THE ARRIVAL OF THE PROJECTILE, , 35 O 

MAPvSTON HAD GROWN FAT, 364 

THE TELESCOPE OF THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, . . 377 

FIRE I 420 

MARSTON AT HIS POST, 440 

(8) 



CHAPTER I. 

THE ARTILLERISTS. 

It was during the great Civil War of the United 
States, that a new and very influential club started 
in Baltimore, Maryland. Every body knows the 
astonishing energy with which the military instinct 
suddenly developed itself in that ship-building, 
engineering, and commercial nation. Shop keepers 
who had hardly ever heard of West Point, jumped 
from their counters into the position of captains, 
colonels and even generals. Their knowledge of 
the art of war soon almost equalled that of the 
great masters of the old world, and, like them 
too, they won victories by enormous discharges 
of bullets, men, and ^'greenbacks." 

But in gunnery especially the Americans even 

surpassed their brethren in Europe. Not that their 

arms ever reached a higher degree of precision; 

but they were constructed on a scale of such 

extraordinary dimensions that ranges were soon 

attained that had never before been known. As 

far indeed as regards plunging fire, flank fire, 

horizontal fire, oblique fire, raking fire, or re- 

(9) 



10 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

verse fire, the English, the French, the Prussians, 
had very little to learn; but even to-day the best 
European cannons, howitzers, and mortars are 
only mere pocket pistols in comparison to the 
formidable engines of the American artillery. 

This is not surprising. The Yankees, the best 
mechanics on earth, are natural born engineers, 
as the Italians are natural born musicians, and 
the Germans are natural born philosophers. It is 
therefore the most natural thing in the world to 
see them bring their daring ingenuity to bear on 
the art of gunnery. Hence their colossal can- 
nons, far .less useful, indeed, than their sewing 
machines, but quite as astonishing and much 
more bewildering. The huge monsters devised 
by Parrot, Dahlgren, Rodman, are well known. 
And the Armstrongs, the Pallisers, the Whit- 
worths, the Treville de Beaulieus, the Krupps, 
had nothing for it but to surrender gracefully 
to their American rivals., 

Accordingly, during the terrible struggle be- 
tween the North and the South, artillery ruled 
the roast in America; every day the Union jour- 
nals chronicled enthusiastically the new inven- 
tions ; in every country store, in every bar room 
throughout the land, the air resounded with ^^ rifled 
cannon, * ' ^ ^ columbiads, ' * '' swamp angels ; ' ' and 



THE ARTILLERISTS. 11 

nearly every green grocer's clerk went crazy from 
calculating difficult problems about ^^the long 
range.'' 

The moment an American conceives an idea, 
he gets another American to share it with. If 
they are three, they elect a president and two 
secretaries ; if four, they nominate a vice presi- 
dent, and the society takes action ; if five, they 
call a stated meeting and the club is established. 
That is exactly what happened at Baltimore. 
The first inventor of a new cannon associated 
himself with the first man who cast it and with 
the first man who bored it. Such was the 
nucleus of the Gun Club. A month after its 
formation, its register contained the names of 
1, 800 effective, and 30,575 corresponding, mem- 
bers. 

It was an imperative condition on every one 
wishing to join this club, an absolute sine qica 
71071^ that he should have invented or at least 
improved a cannon — or if not a cannon, a fire 
arm of some kind. Still the inventors of 15 
shooters, of revolving carabines, or of sabre pis- 
tols and such small fry, enjoyed but slight con- 
sideration among the members of the Gun Club. 
Here, as throughout the nation at large, the 
artillery men overshadowed every body else. 



12 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

*^The reputation they obtain" as a learned 
orator of the Club said one day, ^^is in pro- 
portion to the masses of their cannon, and in 
exact ratio with the square of the distance 
reached by their projectiles." A comical appli- 
cation of Newton's law of terrestrial gravitation. 

The Gun Club once founded, you can easily 
figure to yourself the results soon reached by 
the inventive genius of the Americans. The new 
war engines assumed proportions still more colos- 
sal, so that the shells they discharged often 
killed people who were quietly engaged at their 
occupations miles beyond the target. Such in- 
ventions naturally soon left far behind them the 
timid instruments of European artillery. Just 
figure it out a little for yourself. 

Once, ^^in the good old times," it was thought 
to be a pretty respectable performance, if a 36 
pounder, at a distance of 300 feet, pierced, by a 
flank shot, 36 horses and ()Z men. That was 
only the art in its infancy. It has made some 
progress since. The Rodman cannon threw a 
ball weighing half a ton a distance of seven 
miles, and could have easily stretched 500 horses 
and 300 men. For a time the Gun Club 
seriously entertained the idea of convincing the 
world of such tremendous energy by a grand 



THE ARTILLERISTS, 13 

ocular demonstration. But though the horses 
might possibly be brought together, unfortunately 
the men upon whom it was proposed to operate 
objected so decidedly that the idea was unwil- 
lingly abandoned ; so this great scientific question 
is left unsettled to the present day. 

One thing, however, is quite certain : the 
effect of these cannons was very destructive. 
At every discharge, the combatants fell before 
them like grass before the mowing machine. In 
comparison with such projectiles what was the 
famous ball that, at Coutras in 1587, in the wars 
of Henry IV., put 25 men hors de combat "^ Or 
that other which, at Zorndorff in 1758, when 
Frederic II. was fighting the Russians, killed 40 
men ? or the one thrown by the Austrian can- 
non at Kesselsdorf in 1745, which at every dis- 
charge made seventy enemies bite the sod ? 
What were even those wonderful guns of Jena 
and Austerlitz that had so often decided the day? 
These terrible engines of death would be consid- 
ered mere children's playthings in the Federal War ! 
At the battle of Gettysburg, a conical projectile, 
shot by a rifled cannon, struck down 173 Con- 
federates, and in the retreat across the Potomac, 
a Rodman ball sent 215 Southerners out of this 
wicked world without giving them even time to 



44 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

bless themselves. We must here likewise make 
mention of a formidable mortar invented by J. 
T. Marston, a most distinguished member and the 
Honorary Secretary of the Gun Club. This 
mammoth piece of ordnance at first excited uni- 
versal enthusiasm, but its results by no means 
gratified the general expectation, for it burst at 
its first public trial, and killed a large number 
of the spectators, men, women, and children — 
337 all told. 

These eloquent figures speak sufficiently for 
themselves. Nothing we can say could add to 
their effect. Accordingly we shall conclude this 
part* of the subject by giving the following result, 
obtained after much calculation by W. G. Pit- 
cairn, Esq., the statistician of the Gun Club. 
By dividing the number of victims who had 
fallen beneath bullets and balls, by the number 
of the active members of the Gun Club, he 
found that each one of the latter had killed, on 
an average, 2,375^ men. Even a hasty glance at 
the number must convince the disinterested reader 
that the only avowed objects of this learned 
society were : ist, the annihilation of the human 
race — of course on grounds strictly philanthrop- 
ical — and 2d, the improvement of cannon as the 
best instruments of civilization. The Gun Club 



THE ARTILLERISTS. 15 

was in fact a Society of Exterminating Angels — 
though at heart they were, no doubt, the very 
best fellows in the world. 

It is hardly necessary to add that these 
Americans, brave as fire, by no means confined 
their speculations to theory ; they tested them 
by frequent practical experience. You could find 
in the Club Register officers of every grade, 
lieutenants and generals ; soldiers of every age, 
blushing debutants in the career of arms and 
grizzly veterans still standing solid at their posts. 
!Many had fallen in the battle field, and their 
names were all carefully recorded on the Roll 
of Honor. And many who had returned still 
bore on their persons the marks of their un- 
questioned intrepidity. Crutches, wooden legs, 
artificial arms, iron hands, gutta percha jaws, 
silver sculls, platina noses, false teeth — nothing 
was wanting to the collection \ and W. J. Pit- 
cairn, the statistician already mentioned, calcu- 
lated that in the Gun Club, on an average, 
there was only one arm for every four men, 
and one pair of legs for every six. 

But such trifling considerations ' never disturbed 
the equanimity of these valiant artillery mien, 
and their bosoms swelled with proper pride, and 
they congratulated each other with justifiable 



16 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

emotion whenever the New York Herald'^s battle 
bulletin announced that the number of the slain 
was ten times greater than that of all the 
bullets, balls, and shells counted together. 

One day, however, a sad and miserable day, 
peace was signed by the survivors of the war ; 
the roaring of the artillery ceased ; the mortars 
grew dumb ; howitzers tightly muzzled, and can- 
nons with their heads hanging downwards, were 
dragged off to the arsenals; the balls were piled 
into pretty pyramids ; the bloody tracks of war 
began to fade away ; the cotton plants grew to 
an enormous size on the richly manured fields ; 
mourning garments began to disappear from the 
streets ; and the Gun Club remained plunged in 
a lethargy profound, exanimate, and hopeless. 

A few irrepressible workers, to be sure, un- 
remitting drudges, would still keep on figuring 
at ballistic calculations and dreaming of gigantic 
shells and cyclopean howitzers. But, without 
practice, wherefore such vain theories? Accord- 
ingly the club rooms became gradually deserted ; 
the waiters dozed in the antechambers ; the news- 
papers, unread, grew mouldy on the files ; the 
dark corners resounded with mournful snores ; 
and the members of the Gun Club, once so 
bustling, so noisy, so exuberant, now reduced to 



THE ARTILLERISTS. 17 

silence by a disastrous peace, sulkily dav/dled 
away their days and nights in reveries of pla- 
tonic artillery ! 

^'This is abominable/' exclaimed Tom Hunter, 
one evening, wearily stretching his wooden legs, 
a splendid pair of Palmer's best. ^^ Nothing to 
do ! Nothing to hope for ! What a miserable 
existence ! Where is the grand old time when 
the cannon from Federal Hill woke us up every 
morning with its joyous detonations?" 

^* Those happy days are gone," sang Billsby 
the brave, jolly as ever, though one of his eyes 
was only glass. ^^ That was a time to live in! 
You invented your cannon ; it was hardly cast 
before you could try it on the enemy. Then 
on your return to the camp you got a shake 
hands from Little Mac, or an encouraging nod 
from Sherman. But now the generals are all 
back at their counters, sanding their sugar, 
watering their whiskey, and making the women 
believe that cotton is wool. Ah ! the melan- 
choly days are come indeed, and Othello's oc- 
cupation is gone !" 

^^It's a fact, Billsby!" cried old Colonel 
Bloortisbury, quite energetically. _ ^^ Our fate has 
been pretty rough. Take myself for instance ! 
I gave up the oyster packing business forever, 



18 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

to go to the war. I went to the war, I learned 
how to fight, I took my share in everything 
going, for nearly five years. A life of excite- 
ment and adventure became a second nature to 
me. Where am I now ? Here, a shattered hulk, 
stranded high and dry, with nothing to do but 
put my hands in my pockets!'* 

The gallant old Colonel must have desired him- 
self to be understood figuratively. Never again, 
poor fellow, could he put his hands in his pockets. 
The pockets indeed were plentiful enough, but 
what had become of the hands nobody ever 
knew — thiey had been blown off — arms and all — 
on the Fourth of July, 1864, by the bursting 
of a columbiad in the works before Peters- 
burg. The Colonel had offered a liberal re- 
ward for their recovery, but it had never been 
claimed. 

'^And not a thing likely to turn up !" cried 
J. T. Marston, scratching with his iron fingers 
a part of his head where the skull had been 
replaced by gutta percha. ^' Not a shadow of 
a cloud in the political horizon ! At a time, too, 
when so much has been left undone in the 
science of artillery ! Even this very morning, I, 
the individual now talking to you, completed 
the drawing, with plan, section, elevation and 



THE ARTILLERISTS, 19 

all, of a mortar destined to work a revolution 
in the annals of warfare !'* 

*'You don't say so?" asked Tom Hunter, 
somewhat hurriedly, thinking perhaps of Marston's 
last experiment. 

*'Yes, it is all finished/' replied the latter. 
^'But what will be the good of so many studies 
mastered, of so many difficulties vanquished ? 
Isn't it working for nothing and finding your- 
self? We Yankees seem determined to live in 
peace for the next hundred years, so that even 
Greeley is alarmed, and in this morning's Tri- 
bune comes out in an article showing that we 
shall increase so fast before the century is out 
that we shall be obliged to eat each other up 
for want of room." 

^* Still, Marston," replied the Colonel, 'Uhey are 
always fighting in Europe for something or other." 

''Well? what of it?" 

''Why, we might see what we could do over 
there, and if our services were accepted " 

"What are you thinking of. Colonel?" ex- 
claimed Billsby, even his artificial eye flashing 
with horror. " Study ballistics for the benefit 
of our natural enemies !" 

"Better do even that than do nothing at all," 
retorted the Colonel. 



20 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

^'You're right, Colonel/' said Marston. ^' Still 
we must not think of such a thing.*' 

'^Why not?" asked the Colonel. 

^^ Because," replied Marston, ^^the folks of 
the old world entertain ideas regarding promo- 
tion singularly unconformable with our American 
notions. These people think that you should 
never become commander in chief without having 
commenced as lieutenant ! That's as much as 
to say you should never point a gun without 
having commenced by casting it ! Now I call 
all that " 

'^Absurd nonsense !" cried Hunter. ^^But I 
know it is useless to argue with such people, 
and now I don't see anything else left for us 
to do except to raise tobacco in Virginia, or dig 
oil wells in Pennsylvania." 

^^ What's that?" exclaimed Marston, in a voice 
that rang like a trumpet on the morning of a 
battle. ^^ Do we so soon forget the grand and 
lofty aims for which our club was called into 
existence ? Are we not most solemnly pledged to 
devote the remaining years of our lives to the 
improvement of all kinds of fire arms ? Do you 
imagine that no opportunity will ever occur 
again for trying the range of our projectiles ? 
That the atmosphere will never again flash with 



THE ARTILLERISTS. 21 

the fire of our red artillery ? That no inter- 
national difficulty will ever occur again which 
will allow us to declare war on some trans- 
atlantic powder ? Will the French never run 
down one of our steamers ? Will the English 
be very anxious to settle the Alabama claims ? 
Will the Spaniards never fire at our flag, mis- 
taking us for fillibusters ?" 

*^I'm afraid not, Marston/' answered Blooms- 
bury. ^' The incidents to which you refer are 
too good to be likely to occur soon. And 
even if they did take place, we should never 
profit by them ! France, England and Spain may 
bully us to their hearts' content ! Let them 
bully ! We have made up our minds to have 
peace for a hundred years, and peace we shall 
have ! Thin-skinned Americans are getting out 
of date. The conscription and the taxes have 
so much disgusted us with war, that we are all 
fast becoming a nation of women !'* 

'^Humiliating thought!" cried Billsby. 

'^ Degrading thought!" repeated Hunter. 

** Both humiliating and degrading, if true!" 
cried Marston, vehemently. ''And true I am 
afraid it is ! There are a thousand reasons cut 
and dry for fighting, and yet fight we shall not ! 
We economise legs and arms for people who 



22 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

hardly use them ! — Hold on ! Did not America 
once belong to the British?'* 

^* So they say, at least/* answered Hunter, 
curious to know what Marston was driving 
at. 

'' Well then, should not Great Britain in her 
turn belong to the Americans?** asked Marston 
with a triumphant air. 

^* That would be only justice,'' exclaimed 
Billsby. 

^' Well, you go and propose that to President 
Grant ; how will he receive you ?'* 

" He would send us off with a flea in our 
ear,'* mumbled Billsby, between the only four 
teeth the war had left him. 

^^I shall never vote for him again,*' cried 
Marston. 

^^ Never shall Grant obtain a vote from me!** 
cried all these invalid warriors with one voice. 

*^And now to conclude;** resumed Marston; 
*'my new mortar is designed, and if I am not 
furnished pretty soon with the opportunity of 
testing it on a real battle field, I shall first 
send in my resignation as member of the Gun 
Club ; then I will buy a ticket and travel as 
far west as the Pacific Railroad will take me — 
never to return !** 



THE ARTILLERISTS. 23 

'^ And we shall all follow you — never to re- 
turn !" unanimously replied all his hearers. 

In fact, things by this time had come to 
such a pass that the club was threatened with 
immediate dissolution, when all at once an un 
expected event prevented the occurrence of a 
catastrophe so much to be regretted. 

The very morning after the conversation de- 
tailed above, each member of the club received 
a circular worded as follows : 

*' Baltimore, Md. 

" October 3, 18 6-. 
*' The President of the Gun Club has the honor to 
announce to his associates that at the stated meeting 
of the 5th instant, he will lay before them a commu- 
nication calculated to interest them profoundly. Accord- 
ingly, he entreats them not to fail being present on 
said important occasion. 

^' Their devoted colleague, 

"J. P. Barbican, 

"P. G. cr 



CHAPTER II. 

THE president's COMMUNICATION. 

At eight o'clock on the evening of October 
5th, the rooms of the Gun Club, 24 Monument 
Square, were crowded to suffocation. All the 
members residing in Baltimore or the neighbor- 
hood had been on hand almost since midday. 
As to the corresponding members, the trains 
had been landing them at all hours, and even 
at eight o'clock the cry was *^ still they come.'* 
The immense hall could not hold half of them. 
The neighboring rooms were closely packed : 
the passages were jammed : there was not a 
square inch of room to spare even on the grand 
staircase that ornamented the front of the build- 
ing. All the streets in the neighborhood were 
so thronged, that the city cars stopped running 
for six hours. It had leaked out somehow that 
the President of the Gun Club had a very 
strange communication to make that evening, 
and every one in Baltimore, rich and poor, 
white and colored, was intensely curious to know 

its nature. In spite of the vast numbers, how- 
(-4) 



THE PRESIDENT'S COMMUNICATION'. 25 

ever, it was not a noisy crowd; the most ex- 
citing, contradictory and absurd rumors passed 
from mouth to mouth, but only in whispers; 
fear of losing anything by loud talking kept 
them all comparatively still; though, of course, 
they bustled and jostled, crushed and pushed, 
and elbowed and shouldered, with all that lib- 
erty of action peculiar to a people accustomed 
to self government, and never backward in ex- 
ercising its privileges. 

That evening, in Baltimore, no amount of 
money could purchase a ticket of admission into 
the grand hall ; it was reserved exclusively for 
the most distinguished members, resident or cor- 
respondent : even the ladies had to stay outside : 
the Mayor and the City Council fared no better, 
having to stand in the passages, where they 
could see nothing, and with outstretched ear 
trying to catch as well as they could all that 
was going on. 

The hall itself presented a spectacle at once 
startling and interesting. The decorations of the 
vast apartment were wonderfully appropriate. 
Tall pillars, formed of cannons fitted to each 
other in fishing rod style, stout mortars serving as 
the bases, sustained the light, airy, lace-like cast- 
iron trusses of the roof. Trophies, made of blun- 



26 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

derbusses, arquebusses, linstocks, carabines, match- 
locks, all kinds of fire arms, ancient and modern, 
were grouped in picturesque array along the lofty 
walls. Gas blazed forth from chandeliers made 
of thousands of glittering revolvers, whilst giran- 
doles of pistols and candelabras of guns piled 
in circles, completed the splendid illumination. 
Models of cannons, specimens of gun metal, 
breech-sights riddled with bullets, target plates 
pierced by the balls of the Gun Club, rammers 
and sponges in varied assortment, shells strung 
like pearls, grape shot twisted into necklaces, 
fire balls .formed into garlands, — in a word — an 
endless variety of an artillery man's complete 
stock of tools and materials surprised and pleased 
the eye by their symmetrical arrangement, and 
almost made you think that their object was 
decoration rather than destruction. 

In a most conspicuous position could be seen, 
carefully protected from the dust by a magnifi- 
cent glass shade, a shapeless mass of iron, rent 
and twisted by the action of powder — the pre- 
cious remains of J. T. Marston's giant cannon. 

At the extremity of the hall, the President, 
attended by four secretaries, occupied an elevated 
platform. His seat, supported by a sculptured 
gun carriage, affected the form of a 32-inch 



THE PRESIDENT'S COMMUNICATION. 27 

mortar; it was pointed at an angle of S6^ and 
suspended by the trunnions, so that the President 
could swing himself at pleasure as in a rocking 
chair, a convenience sometimes very desirable on 
account of the great heat. On the desk, which 
was a large wrought-iron plate supported by six 
carronades, lay an ink bottle of exquisite taste, 
made of a beautiful Biscayan rifle splendidly 
carved; beside it stood a detonating bell, which, 
on touching the button, went off with a report 
as loud as a pistol shot. Many a time, during 
the stormy debates, the ringing crack of this 
new fashioned bell, sharp and stunning as it 
was on ordinary occasions, altogether failed to 
make itself heard above the stentorian voices of 
the excited disputants. 

In front of the desk, benches arranged in 
zigzag, like the circumvallations of an entrench- 
ment, formed a succession of bastions and cur- 
tains where the members of the Gun Club took 
their seats, and this evening indeed it could be 
said with truth that 

" Warriors thronged the rampart heights.** 

They knew the President's nature well enough 
to be certain that he would not have called 
them together unless for some very grave reason. 
J. P. Barbican was about fifty years of age, 



28 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

calm, cold, austere, remarkably serious, and of 
all men perhaps the most taciturn and reserved ; 
punctual as a chronometer, of a temper that 
nothing could ruffle, and of a resolution that 
nothing could shake. With no pretensions to 
chivalry, he rather courted dangerous — even rash — 
adventures, but he went into them coolly, and 
with a head full of practical ideas. He was 
rather an extreme specimen of the New Eng- 
lander, the Northern settler, the descendant of 
Cromweirs Ironsides, and, therefore, the impla- 
cable foe of all cavaliers, w^hether they showed 
themselves . as royalists in the old world, or re- 
publicans in the new. In a word, he was a 
cast-iron Yankee. 

A native of the State of Maine, he had made 
an immense fortune in the lumber trade and 
shipbuilding; in the early part of the war he 
had equipped and sent to the field a whole 
regiment almost entirely at his own expense. 
His extraordinary genius for gunnery was soon 
known and highly appreciated, and though his 
name seldom appeared in the papers, his was 
the master hand that directed most of the great 
artillery operations by land and water. Fertile 
in expedients, bold to rashness in his ideas, he 
contributed powerfully to the progress of this 



THE PRESIDEXT'S COMMUNICATION. 29 

branch of the service, and gave experimental 
researches an extraordinary impulse. 

He was of about middle size and — rare excep- 
tion in the Gun Club — his limbs were whole. 
His strongly marked features singularly resembled 
those given to Uncle Sam by the illustrated 
papers, only without their humor or grotesqueness. 
Severe, perhaps even harsh, they seemed to have 
been drawn vrith a square and ruler. If, as it 
is said, you can tell a man's real disposition 
by looking at his profile, Barbican must have 
possessed energy, audacity, and imperturbability, 
each in an extreme degree. 

At this moment he was resting motionless in 
his seat, silent, absorbed, concentrated, his face 
almost concealed by one of those tall ^^ stove 
pipe" h-its which seem to be screwed on to 
American craniums. 

His associates chatted noisily around him, but 
he hardly seemed conscious of their presence ; 
they asked questions, they ventured answers, they 
launched into regions of the wildest speculation, 
keeping a close eye in the meantime on the 
slightest movement of their President : it was all in 
vain : they were still as far as ever from getting 
at the difhcult x of his inexcitable placidity. 

But the moment the last stroke of eidit o'clock 



30 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

had been struck by the fulminating time-piece of 
the great hall, the president rose to his feet as 
suddenly as if he had been shot up by a spring; 
in an instant all noise ceased; the vast assembly 
was still as death, as the orator, in a slightly 
emphatic tone, commenced his long-expected 
speech : 
'^Gentlemen: 

**Too long, as you well know, has a barren 
peace been steeping the members of the Gun 
Club in the mire of a listless inactivity. After 
a most exciting and eventful, but unhappily too 
brief, period of a few years, we have been com- 
pelled to abandon our labors and come to a 
complete stand still on the path of progress. 
I do not hesitate to say aloud, and I care not 
who hears me, that another war coming from 
any quarter whatsoever, got up under any pre- 
tence whatsoever, if it only once more put arms 
in our hands, I should hail with delight '* 

** Certainly !'* cried the excitable Marston. 
*' We must get up another war !" 

^' Hear ! hear!'' broke in the assembly on all 
sides, intensely interested. 

*^ But war,'* continued the President, *' at 
present is impossible, and, whatever may be the 
expectations of the honorable gentleman who has 



THE PRESIDENT'S COMMUNICATION, 31 

just interrupted me, it is my well founded 
opinion that many a year must elapse before 
we shall again hear our cannons roaring on a 
battle field. We must therefore make the best 
of our bad fortune, and look around in search 
of some other outlet for the restless energy that 
consumes us, and, if not legitimately employed, 
must soon destroy us!" 

Redoubled attention on the part of the audi- 
ence. The President was evidently coming to 
the point. 

*^ For the last few months, gentlemen,** re- 
sumed the speaker, '^ I have been asking myself 
if, whilst strictly confining ourselves to our spe- 
ciality, we could not undertake some grand ex- 
periment worthy of the nineteenth century, and 
if the progress we have already made in ballis- 
tics did not afford reasonable grounds for its 
tolerable success. Therefore, I have been trying, 
devising, calculating, and the result of my labors 
has been my certain conviction that we are 
bound to succeed in an enterprise, which in any 
other country would not only be impossible, but 
actually ridiculous from its apparent absurdity. 
This great project, long and carefully elaborated, 
is to be the object of my present communica- 
tion. I need hardly say that I consider it 



32 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

worthy of you, worthy of the honorable Gun 
Club, and that it cannot fail to make a noise 
in the world at large !'* 

^^A great noise?" demanded an excited gunner. 

*^A very great noise in every sense of the 
word," replied the President. 

^^ Order ! order!" cried some of the mem- 
bers. 

^^ No interruptions!" cried others. 

'^ Therefore, gentlemen," resumed the President, 
^^I bespeak your most earnest attention." 

A thrill of new interest pervaded the assem- 
bly, as was particularly shown by eager cries 
of ^Mouder ! louder!" from some old gentlemen 
listening outside in the passages, who were rather 
hard of hearing. 

The President went on : 

*^ There is no one among you, gentlemen, who 
has not gazed long and carefully on the Moon, 
or at least who has not heard of those that 
have. Do not be surprised if I have to 
say a few words to-night regarding the Queen 
of the starry sky. For us is perhaps reserved 
the glory of being the Columbuses of another new 
world. Have confidence in me, and second me 
by all the means in your power, and I shall 
guide you to her State or Territory, which we shall 



THE PRESIDENT'S COMMUNICATION. 33 

annex to all the other States and Territories 
that form the totality of our glorious Union !" 

'* Three cheers for the Moon 1" cried the 
Club in an ecstacy of excitement, and the wild 
hurrahs almost blew the roof off. 

*^ The Moon has been carefully observed and 
studied;" resumed Barbican, ^^her mass, her 
density, her weight, her volume, her composi- 
tion, her movements, her distance, her part in 
the solar system has been perfectly determined. 
Maps of the Moon have been constructed of a 
perfection pretty nearly equalling, if not surpassing, 
that of the best maps of the e irth. Photography 
has taken incomparably beautiful charts of the 
surface of our terrestrial satellite.* In a word, 
w^e know regarding the Moon everything that 
the mathematical sciences, astronomy, geology 
and optics are capable of discovering : but to 
this day no direct communication ha^ been es- 
tablished with her." 

A violent expression of interest and surprise 
welcomed this assertion. 

'^Permit me, gentlemen," continued the orator, 
'' to remind you in a few words that certain 



* For instance, the splendid pi. olographs obtained by De ia Kue, 
Rutherford and others. 



34 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

eager spirits, embarked on imaginary voyages, 
pretended to have penetrated the secrets of our 
satellite. In the sixteenth century a certain 
David Fabricius, the discoverer of spots on the 
sun, claimed to have seen with his own eyes 
the inhabitants of the Moon. In 1649, a French- 
man, named Jean Baudoin, published a work 
entitled A Journey to the Moon, by Domingo 
GonzaleZy a Spanish adventurer. About the same 
time Cyrano de Bergerac gave the world his 
Comic history of the States and Empires of the 
Moon, so much relished by the French even of 
the present day, and the work from which 
Dean Swift conceived the idea of writing Gulli- 
ver's Travels. Somewhat later, another French- 
man — the French take great interest in the 
Moon — the illustrious Fontenelle, wrote the Plu- 
rality of Worlds, the master piece of the age. 
But science in her onward march crushes even 
master pieces 1 About thirty years ago, a pam- 
phlet, reprinted from the New York Sun, related 
hqw Sir John Herschel, sent to the Cape of Good 
Hope by the British government to prosecute 
his astronomical observations, had constructed a 
telescope internally illuminated and of such 
wonderful power, that he had brought the Moon 
within a range of eighty yards. Of course, at 



THE PRESIDENT'S COMMUNICATION, 35 

such a short distance it was easy to perceive 
the dark caverns inhabited by hippopotamuses, 
the green mountains fringed with golden lace, 
the ivory-horned sheep, the snow white deer, 
the inhabitants themselves, ' man-bats,* winged 
creatures half bird half human being. This 
pamphlet, professing to be the advanced sheets 
of an article written for the Edinburgh Journal 
of Science by Sir John himself, was really the 
work of a countryman of our own named 
Richard Adams Locke, as I need hardly remind 
many of you, and it created for a time a profound 
sensation. It was translated into every language 
and had extraordinary success in all countries. 
In France particularly the excitement was intense. 
But it was soon discovered to be a hoax of 
the purest water, and the French themselves were 
the first to laugh at it." 

^'A Frenchman to laugh at an American!'* 
exclaimed IMarston, ^' a casus helli, if there ever 
was one T' 

'' Keep cool, my worthy friend ; the French, 
before laughing, had been completely duped by 
our clever countryman. But now, to end this 
rapid sketch, I must add that a certain Ha?is 
Pfaal of Rotterdam, quitting the earth in a 
balloon filled with a gas extracted from nitrogen, 



36 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

and thirty-seven times lighter than hydrogen, 
reached the Moon after a passage of nineteen 
days. This trip, however, I need hardly say, 
was like all the preceding, simply imaginary, but 
it was the work of another American, of strange, 
erratic, but transcendent, genius. There is no 
necessity to say that I allude to our famous 
townsman, the brilliant Edgar Allen Poe !'* 

^^ Hurrah for Poe!'' cried the electrified as- 
sembly. 

^^ I have now done" resumed the President, 
'^ with attempts purely literary and evidently in- 
sufficient to establish any serious relations between 
our earth and the queen of the nightly host. 
However, I must add that a few geniuses of a 
practical turn of mind, have endeavored to put 
us into serious communication with her. A few 
years ago, a German geometrician proposed send- 
ing a commission of savants to the steppes of 
Siberia. There, on the vast plains, thousands of 
miles in extent, they should erect structures in 
the shape of immense geometrical figures, among 
others, for instance, the square of the hypothenuse. 
These figures, strongly illuminated by reflected 
lights, every intelligent being could easily under- 
stand the meaning of. The inhabitants of the 
Moon, seeing them, would reply by a corres- 



THE PRESIDENTS COMMUNICATION. 37 

ponding figure, and communication once estab- 
lished, it would be the easiest thing in the world 
to create an alphabet wherewith we could maintain 
a regular conversation with our lunar brethren. 
This was the German geometrician's ingenious 
idea, but his project, for some reason or other, 
was never put into execution, and to this day- 
no direct connection exists between the earth and 
her satellite. But, gentlemen, it is reserved for 
the practical genius of Americans to establish this 
connection. The means of doing so is at once 
simple, easy, certain, infallible, as you will all 
readily admit in a very few moments/' 

A hurricane, no, a cyclone of applause inter- 
rupted these words. Even the listeners outside 
on the steps had caught an idea of what was 
going on, and gave vent to the wildest expres- 
sions of .excitement. But the people in the streets 
kept still as death. 

^' Order ! order! silence! shut up!" soon re- 
sounded sharply and imperiously from all quarters. 

When the general agitation was a little calmed. 
Barbican resumed his discourse in still graver 
tones. 

'* You know, gentlemen, what progress the 
science of gunnery has made within a few years, 
and to what degree of perfection fire arms would 



38 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

have attained, if the war had lasted a little 
longer. You are also well aware that, speaking 
in a general manner, the resisting power of 
cannons and the expansive power of gun powder 
may be considered actually illimitable. There- 
fore, grounding myself firmly on this principle 
to start with, I have asked myself if, by means 
of suitable apparatus constructed with reference 
to well determined laws of resistance, it would 
not be possible to send a ball to the Moon!'* 
Language cannot describe the mighty cry that 
rang from the vast assembly at these words. It 
was the concentrated expression of surprise, joy, 
pride, enthusiasm, all raised to the highest pitch 
of intensity. Then there was a calm like the 
hush preceding the earthquake shock. Then 
the storm burst forth in all its grandeur : a 
storm of yelling, shouting, screaming, stamping, 
beating the floor with sticks, and waving um- 
brellas in the air. The whole building shock 
with the reverberations. It was a tremendous 
scene. The ordinary American crowd is pretty 
quiet, and when under excitement rather un- 
demonstrative than otherwise. But even in 
America, scientific men are exceptions to the 
general rule of humanity. In vain did the 
President try to restore order. He touched off 



THE PRESIDENT'S COMMUNICATION. 39 

the detonating bell. He roared till he vras 
black in the face. His arms played around 
his head like the sails of a wind mill, until 
they dropped from sheer fatigue. Fully ten 
minutes had elapsed before the storm had spent 
its rage so far that he could succeed in making 
himself heard. ^' Let me finish, won't you?" 
he cried in husky tones, '^ I have faced this 
great question in all its aspects, I have over- 
hauled it in all its phases, I have scrutinized 
it in all its relations, and figures impossible to 
gainsay have convinced m.e that any projectile 
starting with an initial velocity of 12,000 yards 
a second, and shot in the direction of the 
Moon, must surely and necessarily reach her. 
This grand experiment, gentlemen, I have now 
the honor of proposing to you for a trial !" 



CHAPTER III. 



THE EFFECT. 



It would be useless to attempt giving even a 
faint description of the effect produced by the 
President's last words. The tempest broke forth 
with greater fury then ever. The yellings, 
screamings, stampings, batterings, wavings, etc., 
were repeated with an energy that seemed to 
have paused only to take fresh breath. If all 
the arms in the hall, not excepting the colum- 
biads, had been fired off at once, they would 
not have made half such a din : or, to speak 
learnedly, they would not have set the vibrating 
sound-waves in half such tremendous commotion. 
But this, after all, is not so surprising. When we 
come to think of it, we know plenty of can- 
noniers who are far noisier than their cannons. 

The President alone remained standing, calm 

and collected in the midst of this wild storm 

of enthusiasm; probably he wished to say a few 

more words on the subject, for his arms made 

desperate, but ineffectual, signals for silence, and 

the fulminating bell pealed volleys of detona- 
(40) 



THE EFFECT. 41 

tions in vain. Very soon he was laid . hold 
of by violent but friendly hands, and carried out 
in triumph to the balcony in front of the Club 
House, where his appearance was the signal for 
new demonstrations of the wildest applause from 
the vast multitudes. 

They had all comprehended the idea in an 
instant, and saw no real difficulty in it. An 
American sees no real difficulty in anything. 
Whoever said that the word ^^ impossible " is not 
French, was certainly wrong : he mistook the 
dictionary. In America everything is easy, 
everything is simple, from throwing off 50,000 
printed impressions in an hour, to moving mon- 
ster hotels, guests and all, to any quarter of 
the city at pleasure. In America, engineering 
difficulties seem to be all still-born. Between 
Barbican's project and its complete realization, 
no true American could see the shadow of a 
difficulty. To say it, meant to do it. 

A grand torchlight procession was extempo- 
rized on the spot. Every one took part in it. 
The foreign element of the Baltimore population 
was quite as much excited as the natives. 
Irishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Scotchmen, Eng- 
lishmen, all national prejudice completely effaced, 
fell into line in a few moments, every man 



42 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

equipped with a blazing torch, though where 
they had got them at such short notice, I am 
sure I can't tell. In the enthusiasm of the 
moment, every one gave vent to his excitement 
in words of his own language, so that a strange 
jargon of sounds soon saluted the startled ear. 
" Cead mi lie Failthe !'' "Bully for you T' " Vive 
la lune r' ''Hip, hip, hurrah!'' '' Hoch lehe der 
Mondr' ''Three cheers for the MoonT' '' Ti- 
gar-r r' — not to mention the Ethiopian excla- 
mations, which I would give you if I knew 
them — formed another tumultuary tower of Babel, 
of which the reader, if of a very active imagi- 
nation, may possibly form to himself a picture. 
Strange to say, while this was going on, the 
Moon, as if aware that it was all done in her 
honor, came out from behind the fleecy clouds, 
glittering with a serene brilliancy that soon 
made the torches ^^ pale their ineffectual fires." 
All eyes were turned towards her radiant disc j 
some saluted her with the hand; others called 
her pet names ; some measured her apparent 
size by separate finger and thumb; others shook 
their heads and fists threateningly at her. An 
optician on Calvert street, who had nearly 
ruined himself by importing an immense stock 
of army telescopes before the close of the war, 



THE EFFECT. 43 

next morning found himself one of the richest 
men in Baltimore. The Moon was inspected as 
closely and as curiously as some fine lady in 
her opera-box on a fashionable night, or rather 
with the vivid interest which a man betrays for 
the horse that he contemplates purchasing. These 
daring Americans looked on her already as part 
and parcel of their glorious Union. To effect 
this, nothing more need he done than fire a 
cannon at her, a rather rude mode of courtship, 
no doubt, but one very much in favor among 
the most civilized nations. Annexations, from 
India to Alsace, are seldom accomplished in any 
other way. 

The Cathedral bell tolled midnight, but the 
enthusiasm showed no signs of diminution ; it 
seemed to have equally pervaded all ranks. The 
mayor, the stevedore ; the city councilman, the 
hod carrier; the judge, the newsboy; the pro- 
fessor, the bootblack; the lawyer, the chimney 
sweep; the merchant, the sailor; the doctor, 
the policeman; — all felt themselves glowing with 
patriotic emotion; the national honor was inti- 
mately bound up with the success of the enter- 
prise ; accordingly, '^ Old Town'' and '^ New 
Town," the wharves on the Patapsco and those 
on the Basin, Mount Clare and Canton, all 



44 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

parts of the city overflowed with crowds full 
of joy, noise, and whiskey. Everybody talked, 
speechified, discussed, disputed, applauded, con- 
tradicted — from the gentleman treating his nu- 
merous guests to champagne in the aristocratic 
mansions of Washington Square to the boat 
hand poisoning himself with *^bug juice *' in 
the dens of FelFs Point. 

But as everything human must come to an 
end, the excitement at last began by degrees to 
die away. Barbican reached Barnum*s Hotel in 
a dreadful state, his clothes all torn, and his 
body all black and blue. A Hercules could 
hardly have encountered such enthusiasm and 
lived. As the hours advanced, the streets be- 
come more and more deserted. The four great 
railroads converging at Baltimore, the Philadel- 
phia and Wilmington, the Northern Central, the 
Baltimore and Ohio, and the Baltimore and 
Washington, had a busy time of it all that 
night and next day in whirling off the stran- 
gers to their homes in various quarters of the 
Union. 

You must not, however, suppose that, during 
this memorable evening, Baltimore alone was the 
prey of such absorbing emotion. All the other 
great cities. New York, Philadelphia, Boston, 



THE EFFECT, 45 

Albany, Chicago, Washington, Richmond, St. 
Louis, Charleston, and New Orleans, even San 
Francisco, from the Lakes to the Gulf, and 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, all shared in 
the universal intoxication of intense curiosity. 
The 30,000 corresponding members of the Gun 
Club had each received the President's circular, 
and all those that could not go to Baltimore 
had been waiting with feveri'sh impatience for 
the famous communication of the fifth of Octo- 
ber. Accordingly, that very evening, as the 
words fell from the lips of the orator, they flew 
over the wires to all parts of the Union, at 
the rate of 20,000 miles a second. The asser- 
tion, therefore, may be safely risked without 
much fear of contradiction, that the whole 
United States of America, ten times the size of 
France, joined together in one tremendous in- 
stantaneous hurrah ! and that forty millions of 
hearts, swelling with joy and pride, fluttered at 
the very same instant with the very same pul- 
sation. 

In ^^less than no time,'* as they say in Ireland, 
the question was grappled by the 574 daily 
papers,* by the tri-weeklies, the semi-weeklies, the 

* Census of 1870. 



46 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

weeklies, and by all the magazines, semi-monthly, 
monthly, bi-monthly and quarterly, 5,871 in all. 
They attacked it under every aspect, physical, 
meteorological, economical, moral, and whether 
viewed from the stand point of politics or of 
civilization. They asked themselves if the Moon 
was a world already arrived at perfection, or 
was it still undergoing some important transfor- 
mation ? Did it resemble the Earth at the time 
before our atmosphere had commenced to exist? 
What spectacle would be presented by that face 
of hers which always remains invisible to us 
terrestrians ? Although at present the all-impor- 
tant point was to send a projectile to the starry 
queen, everybody could see plainly that this 
would be only the first of a series of experi- 
ments. It was expected confidently that the day 
was not far off when America would sound the 
profoundest depth of yon mysterious disc, and 
even some long-headed politicians fancied that 
they already saw therein the beginning of the 
breaking up of the European balance of power. 
The question having been once set squarely 
before the public eye, not a single paper en- 
tertained the least doubt of its ultimate and 
complete realization. It was as certain as the 
** Centennial.'' The project everywhere met the 



THE EFFECT. 47 

warmest popular favor. Even the serious papers 
issued by the societies — scientific, literary, and 
religious — were quite enthusiastic on the subject, 
and published long eloquent articles conclusively 
proving that the millenium of happiness would 
dawn on mankind, and that all our sufferings, 
physical, mental, and moral, should instantly 
cease the moment intimate relations were estab- 
lished between the Earth and the Moon. In 
particular, the ^'Historical Society ^^ of Boston, 
the '^ A77ierican Society ^^ of Albany, the '^ Geo- 
graphical Society'*'' of New York, the '^ Society of 
the Natural Sciences '' of Philadelphia, the 
^' Young Gentlefnen'' s Christian Association^^ of 
Chicago, and the ^^ S^nithsonian Institute ** of 
Washington, wrote thousands of letters, congrat- 
ulating the Gun Club, and offering every assist- 
ance in their power, whether money, advice, or 
active co-operation. 

Never, we can truly say, did project receive 
such an immense number of adherents; of hesi- 
tation, doubt, uneasiness, there was not the 
glimpse of a shadow. As to malicious jokes, 
caricatures, or songs, which in Europe generally, 
but in France particularly, would have covered 
with ridicule the idea of sending a ball to the 
Moon — woe to the wit that would make them, to 



48 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

the artist that would draw them, and to the paper 
that would publish them ! Even in America the 
caricaturists have to be careful in choosing sub- 
jects for excoriation. There, of course, as else- 
where, it is always pretty safe to make fun of 
the weak, to strike the man that is down. 
But even journals of civilization know better 
than to ridicule the party, the sect, or the idea 
that may, for the moment, be playing the pre- 
dominant part in the eyes of the nation. 

No wonder, therefore, if, for the time being, 
J. P. Barbican became all at once the most 
distinguished- man of any age or country, a 
scientific George Washington, the popular idol 
whom it was absolute suicide to gainsay. One 
little anecdote, among many others of the same 
kind, will show how far ^^ one man worship** 
may be carried even in the United States. 

A few evenings after the famous meeting of 
the Gun Club, Mr. Marshall, the lessee of the 
Holliday Street Theatre, announced his intention 
of bringing out before the Baltimore public at 
an early date Shakespeare's famous play of Much 
ado about Nothing, with new dresses and scenery 
and an admirable cast of characters. But a 
crowd of those roughs called '^ Flug Uglies,'^ 
and ^' Blood Tubs^'^ seeing in the title of the 



THE EFFECT, 49 

play an offensive allusion to Barbican's project, 
broke into the theatre, tore up the seats, and 
threatened to set fire to the building, if the 
lessee did not immediately change his pro- 
gramme. Mr. Marshall, bowing before the storm 
of popular indignation, promptly withdrew the 
unlucky piece, replacing it by another of Shake- 
speare's plays, As you like it, which for several 
weeks had an immense run, the theatre being 
packed every night, as the Balti^nore Public 
Ledger pithily expressed it, ^^ from pit to dome,'* 
and '^thousands being turned away, unable to 
obtain admission.*' 



CHAPTER IV. 

REPLY FROM THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY. 

All such triumphs had very little effect on 
Barbican's incessant activity. Without losing an 
instant, his first care was to call another meet- 
ing of the Gun Club. There, after slight dis- 
cussion, it was unanimously resolved, first to 
consult the astronomers regarding the astronom- 
ical part of the enterprise; then, on the receipt 
of their reply, to decide on the most approved 
mechanical means of securing the success of the 
magnificent experiment. 

Accordingly, a letter worded in the most pre- 
cise terms, and demanding information on the 
most important points, was sent off that very 
evening to the Director of the University Ob- 
servatory, Cambridge, Mass. This university, the 
first founded in the United States, it is hardly 
necessary to say, enjoys a world-wide fame, par- 
ticularly for its astronomical department. Here are 
to be found united the most watchful of observers 
and the most daring of theorists; here Peirce 

has written his Moon- Culminations , Bond has 
(so) 



REPLY FROM THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY, 51 

resolved the nebula of Andromeda into discrete 
points of light — a problem that had so far baffled 
all other astronomers — and Clarke has discovered 
a satellite to Sirius. Here, therefore, could the 
Gun Club, most confidently expect the latest 
and most reliable information on everything ter- 
restrial and celestial, whether lunar, solar, or 
planetary. 

In three days the answer punctually arrived, 
and you may conceive with what interest Barbi- 
can was listened to as he read its contents. 

" Cambridge Observatory, Mass. 

October 8, i86-. 
"To the President and the other Members 

of the Gun Club, BaUimore, Md. : 

" Gentlemen : 

"On receipt of your esteemed favor of the 6th Inst., 
addressed to the Director of the Cambridge Observa- 
tory by the Gun Club of Baltimore, I have the honor 
to state that the members of our astronomical staff 
were immediately called together, and the several ques- 
tions having been successively laid before them, the fol- 
lowing respective replies were unanimously resolved upon : 

" I. To question first: Is it possible to send a pro- 
jectile to the Moon ? we answer : 

*' Yes, quite possible, If you only endow your pro- 
jectile with an Initial velocity of twelve thousand 
(i2,ooo) yards a second. A simple calculation shows 



52 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

such a velocity to be quite sufRcient. As the force 
of terrestrial gravity decreases according to the square 
of the distance from the earth, the weight of the ball 
must rapidly diminish, and it will be reduced to zero 
the instant the attraction of the Moon becomes equal 
to that of the earth — that is to say, when the projectile 
has made the |f of the transit. At that moment it 
will have lost all its gravity, and, once that it clears 
this point, as a matter of course, it must fly directly 
to the Moon in obedience to the law of lunar 
attraction. The theoretic possibility of the success of 
the experiment being therefore rigidly demonstrated, its 
certainty clearly depends altogether on the force of the 
engine employed to discharge the projectile. 

** 2. To the second question : What is the exact dis- 
tance betiAjeen the Moon and the Earth ? we reply : 

** As the Moon's track around the Earth, is not a 
circle^ but an ellipse^ of which our globe occupies one 
of the fociy it follows that the Moon must be nearer 
to the Earth at some points than at others. The 
difference between her maximum and minimum distance 
is quite considerable. In her apogee^ or greatest dis- 
tance from us, she is 252,958 miles away; in her 
perigee^ or nearest point to us, she is 221,593 miles 
away; which makes a difference of 31,000 miles be- 
tween the two points, or more than a ninth of the 
whole distance. It is on our distance, therefore, from 
this perigean point of the Moon, that we must base 
our calculations. 



REPLY FROM THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY. 53 

" 3. To the third question : Ho^jj long ivould it take 
a projectile to travel this minimum distance^ provided it 
had recei'ved sufficient initial 'velocity / andy consequently ^ 
at njohat moment should it he discharged so that it might 
hit the Moon at a pre-determined point ? we reply : 

" Supposing the bullet to maintain all through its 
initial velocity of 12,000 yards a second, It would take 
only about nine hours to arrive at its destination 5 but, 
as this initial velocity must gradually diminish, it has 
been found, by some careful calculation, that the pro- 
jectile would take 83^ hours to reach the point where 
the terrestrial and the lunar attractions neutralize each 
other, and that from this point it would take 1 3 hours, 
53 minutes and 20 seconds more to reach the Moon. 
In order to hit the Moon, therefore, at a pre-deter- 
mined point, the projectile should be discharged 97 hours 
13 minutes and 20 seconds before her arrival there. 

** 4. To the fourth question : At <what precise moment 
nvill the Moon present herself in the most fa'vorahle 
position to he hit hy the projectile ? we reply : 

** According to observations already presented, it will 
evidently be necessary not only to select the time when 
the Moon Is in her perigee^ but also, if possible, the 
precise moment when she is In the %enith, as that 
would be an additional shortening of the transit, by 
nearly 4,000 miles, the length of the earth's radius. 
Now, though the Moon Is in her perigee once a month, 
It is only very seldom that she Is in the zenith at the 
same moment, long intervals often elapsing before the 



54 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

two conditions are fulfilled. Evidently, therefore, you 
must wait for the coincidence of the perigee with the 
%enith. Fortunately, In the present instance, you will 
not have long to wait. On December 4th of next 
year, the Moon will present the two following condi- 
tions: at midnight she will be in her nearest point to 
the earth, and at precisely the same moment she will 
have reached her highest point in the sky. 

*' 5. To the fifth question : At ^what point in the 
heavens should the cannon discharging the projectile, be 
aimed ? we answer : 

" The preceding observations being once admitted, 
the cannon should be aimed vertically, so that, the line 
of motion being perpendicular to the plane of the 
horizon, the projectile may the more rapidly rid itself 
of the effects of terrestrial gravitation. And, as the 
Moon never departs further than 28^ north- or south 
of the equator, it is evident that the cannon must be 
placed in some spot comprised within these latitudes. 
Anywhere else the shot should necessarily have an 
oblique direction — a condition highly injurious, if not 
fatal, to the success of the experiment. 

" 6. To the sixth question : What point should the 
Moon occupy in the shy the instant the projectile is dis- 
charged? we answer ; 

** Several considerations must here be taken Into ac- 
count : ist, the velocity of the Moon; 2d, the velocity 
of the projectile; 3d, the effect of the earth's motion 
in deflecting the course of the latter. Omitting the 



REPLY FROM THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY. 55 

third consideration for a moment, it is clear that, as 
the Moon moves in her orbit at the rate of 13^ 10' 
35" every twenty-four hours, she should be at a point 
east of the zenith and four times that distance from it, 
at the moment of the discharge 5 because as the 
bullet takes four days to make the transit, at the end 
of that time the Moon and the projectile should neces- 
sarily come together. But as we must also take into 
consideration the amount of deviation imparted to the 
bullet by the two fold motion of the earth, and as 
we have ascertained this to amount to 11 degrees on 
the Moon's orbit, we must evidently add these 11 de- 
grees to the 52^ 42' 20" already obtained, so that we shall 
have a total of, say, 64 degrees in round numbers. 
Therefore if, at the moment of the discharge, a line 
from the Moon's centre makes with the vertical an 
angle of 64 degrees, and if all goes njcell, the projec- 
tile and the Moon will infallibly come together in four 
days, one hour, thirteen minutes and twenty seconds, a 
few seconds more or less being allowed for the unavoid- 
able imperfection of our instruments. 

** To sum up : 

** I. The station for the cannon must be in some 
country lying between 28^ north and 28^ south of the 
equator. 

" 2. The cannon must be aimed directly at the zenith 
of the station. 

" 3. The projectile must possess an initial velocity of 
12,000 yards per second. 



56 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

** 4. It must be discharged on the first of December, 
next ye%r, at one hour, thirteen minutes and twenty- 
seconds before midnight. 

" 5. It will meet the Moon four days after, at mid- 
night precisely, the very moment she reaches the zenith. 

" The members of the Gun Club should therefore 
commence without delay all the necessary labors, so as 
to be ready at the appointed time, for If they let slip 
the favorable conjuncture presented at midnight between 
the fourth and the fifth of December, they will have 
to wait 18 years and 11 days before a similar oppor- 
tunity occurs again. 

'* In conclusion : the professors composing the staff 
of the Cambridge Observatory unite In assuring the 
members of the Gun Club, that they will be always 
exceedingly happy to answer, as far as in their power, 
all further questions In theoretic astronomy 5 and they 
cordially join with the rest of our great Union In de- 
siring the Club's complete success In practically solving 
the grandest scientific problem of the day. 
" With highest regard, 
[Signed^) "J. M. Belfast, 

" Director of the Cambridge Observatory.'''' 



CHAPTER V. 

THE ROMANCE OF THE MOON. 

Laplace, the Newton of the i8th century, sur- 
prised at finding the planetary orbits all nearly 
in the same plane, and the planets themselves 
not only rotating on their axes, but also re- 
volving around the sun, in the same general 
direction, undertook to account for such phe- 
nomena by what has since been called the 
^^ Nebular Hypothesis ^ This theory, though far 
from tenable on more grounds than one, is too 
stimulative of reflection, and too important in 
other respects, to be overlooked by the young 
astronomer. We consider the present a most 
favorable moment for alluding to its chief fea- 
tures, by way of an introduction to our Romance 
of the Moon. 

Millions of ages ago, an observer, endowed 

with an eye of supernatural penetration and 

placed in the centre of our mighty universe, 

might have seen himself surrounded on all sides 

by endless myriads of atoms shooting incessantly 

in all directions, but by degrees more and more 

(57) 



58 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

disposed to move around each other and to 
combine together, in obedience to the great im- 
mutable laws of attraction and chemical affinity 
which the omnipotent Creator of all things had 
established from the beginning. As the atoms 
coalesced, the observer could behold the particles 
growing larger and larger, and gradually assum- 
ing the nature of those nebulous clusters that 
we see at present faintly glittering like misty 
clouds in the dark depths of the midnight sky. 
The larger the masses grew, the rapider became 
their motion around a central point, where, as 
the whirling matter became more and more con- 
densed, a bright central sun, the nucleus of the 
nebula^ was the final result. What took place 
in his immediate neighborhood, the observer 
could see everywhere repeated around him, even 
into the regions of infinite distance. At the 
present day, astronomers count actually nearly 
5,000 nebulas separate and distinct, and among 
them one, called by us the Milky Way, which 
contains at least 18 millions of stars, each the 
centre of a great solar system. 

If our observer had w^atched one of these 
stars, and that by no means the largest or the 
brightest, he would have seen our Sun under- 
going all the successive developments to which 



THE ROMANCE OF THE MOON, 59 

every individuality in the Universe is subject. 
He would have seen it, while still in a gaseous 
state, and composed of ever restless molecules, 
turning on its axis to complete its work of 
concentration. He would have seen this motion, 
in obedience to mechanical laws, become accel- 
erated more and more with the increasing dimi- 
nution of volume, until, at last, the time would 
come when the centrifugal, or centre-flying, would 
get the better of the centripetal, or centre-seek- 
ing, force. 

Then another phenomenon would take place 
before the eyes of our observer. The molecules 
lying in the plane of the equator would fly off 
at a tangent, like a stone from a sling when 
the cord snaps, and would form around the Sun 
several concentric rings, resembling those of 
Saturn. These rings, composed of cosmical mat- 
ter, while spinning round the central mass, would 
break up in their turn and decompose themselves 
into secondary nebulas, that is to say, planets. 
These planets, if attentively watched by our ob- 
server, would be seen to comport themselves 
exactly like the Sun their parent, throwing off, 
as he had done, one or more cosmical rings, 
the origin of those secondary planets called 
moons or satellites. 



60 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

Counting back then from the satellite to the 
planet, from the planet to the Sun, from the 
Sun to the central star, from the central star to 
the nebula, from the nebula to the nebulosity (a 
shapeless mass of nebulous matter), from the 
nebulosity to the molecule, and from the mole- 
cule to the atom, we have all the transforma- 
tions undergone by the various celestial bodies 
since the beginning of Creation. 

So much for the Nebular Hypothesis. 

The Sun, a small star belonging to the nebula 
called the Milky Way, insignificant as he appears 
in the immensities of the starry universe, is in 
reality of enormous size, his bulk being more 
than a million and a quarter times greater than 
that of our Earth. Around him gravitate eight 
planets, sprung, as has been conjectured, from 
his viscera, but how many ages ago nobody can 
say. These planets are in order: Mercury, 
Venus, the Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, 
and Neptune. Besides these, in the space be- 
tween Mars and Jupiter, are circulating the 
Asteroids, more than no of them being dis- 
covered so far ; they are probably the pieces 
of a shattered ring or planej:, though Leverrier 
has shown that their combined mass can hardly 
exceed the one-fourth of that of our Earth. 



THE ROMANCE OF THE MOON. 61 

The planets are kept in their orbits around the 
Sun by the great law of gravitation, and some 
of them in their turn are attended by satellites 
of their own, Saturn having eight; Uranus, 
eight ; Jupiter, four ; Neptune, perhaps three ; 
and the Earth, one. It was this latter one, 
called the Moon, the least important of all the 
heavenly bodies, that our daring Americans had 
now determined to conquer. 

This beauteous queen of the night, relatively 
so near us, and so regular in the variety of her 
phases, must from the very beginning have 
shared with the Sun the interested attention of 
man. For the Sun, with all his power and 
majesty, is too dazzling to the eye to be con- 
templated with pleasure, whereas the gentle 
Phoebe, gracious and more humane, attracts the 
delighted gaze of all by the sweetness and 
modesty of her demeanor. With all her de- 
mureness, however, she sometimes takes the 
liberty of eclipsing her mighty brother, com- 
pletely shearing the radiant Apollo of his golden 
beams. The regularity of the period of her 
revolution around the earth, nearly 30 days, 
being probably the first astronomical observation 
ever made by man, she has given her name to 
the early division of time called- the Month, 



62 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

and even to this day among the Mahometans, 
the lunar month is the regular and the only one. 
The ancients held the chaste goddess in espe- 
cial esteem, and paid her divine worship ; the 
Egyptians calling her Isis; the Phoenicians, As- 
tarte ; the Greeks, Artemis ; the Romans, Diana ; 
but in the early ages, even the philosophers 
appear to have known very little of her consti- 
tution or size, and the laws which regulated 
her movements. The Arcadians held that their 
ancestors had inhabited their country before the 
very existence of the Moon ; Simplicius consid- 
ered her to" be motionless and fixed in a crystal 
sphere ; Tatius looked on her as a detached 
fragment of the solar disc ; Clearchus made her 
a polished mirror, reflecting the surface of the 
oceans ; while others saw in her nothing but a 
revolving globe half ice, half fire, or even a 
condensed mass of vapors exhaled from the 
earth. 

Still, some of the sagacious ones, by dint of 
careful observations, every now and then got a 
glimpse of the true state of things. Thales, 
born at Miletus about 640 years before Christ, 
said that the Moon was illuminated by the Sun, 
and predicted an eclipse. Aristarchus of Samos, 
gave a correct explanation of her phases. Bero- 



THE ROMANCE OF THE MOON. 63 

sus, of Chaldea, who lived in the time of Alex- 
ander the Great, discovered that the period of 
her rotation round her axis was equal to that 
of her revolution around the earth, and that, 
therefore, she should always present to us the 
same face. Hipparchus of Rhodes, 150 years 
before Christ, discovered inequalities in her move- 
ments, which were confirmed, 150 years after 
Christ, by Ptolemy of Egypt. Further investi- 
gations, successfully prosecuted by Abou I'Wafa, 
of Bagdad, in the tenth century, were at last 
completed by Copernicus, the famous priest of 
Thorn, in the fifteenth century, and by Tycho 
Brahe, of Denmark, in the sixteenth, who at 
last pretty nigh exhausted every difficulty in the 
great problem of the lunar movements. 

Then Galileo of Florence took up that of 
her physical constitution, and, by means of 
shadow^s cast upon her surface, calculated some 
of her mountains to be about 27,000 feet high, 
almost equal to the Himalayahs. This altitude 
Hevelius of Dantzic reduced to 15,000 feet, 
about the height of Mont Blanc, but Riccioli, 
the Jesuit professor at Bologna, calculated some 
of the mountains in the Moon to be at least 
42,000 feet high. Sir John Herschel, the illus- 
trious discoverer of Uranus, by means of his 



64 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

gigantic forty foot telescope erected at Slough, 
near Windsor, about 90 years ago, reduced these 
altitudes even below that given by Hevelius. 

But Herschel himself was wrong, and the 
long and patient studies of many eminent 
astronomers, more particularly those of Messrs. 
Beer and Madler, and of many others before 
them whose names it would now be tedious to 
enumerate, were still required before the ques- 
tion was finally decided. Thanks to such labors, 
the height of the mountains of the IMoon is 
now well known. Professor Madler, till 1866 
the Director of the famous Observatory of 
Dorpat in Russia, in conjunction with his inti- 
mate friend Wilhelm Beer, brother of the cele- 
brated composer Meyerbeer, has published a map 
of the IMoon, giving the locality and height of 
1,095 mountains, of which twenty-two are as- 
certained to be above 14,000 feet high, six to 
be above 15,000, while the highest peak lifts it 
summit nearly 29,000 feet above the surface of 
the lunar disc. Galileo, therefore, and espe- 
cially Hevelius were very nearly right, and it is 
w^orthy of remark that the height of the great 
mountains of the IMoon was known long before 
that of those of the Earth. 

The surface of the Moon was also subjected 



THE ROMANCE OF THE MOON. 65 

to the closest examination; it appeared to be 
riddled with craters, and every observation con- 
firmed its volcanic character. From the fact 
that the planets eclipsed by her underwent no 
refraction at the moments of occultation, it was 
argued that she must be absolutely without an 
atmosphere. Absence of air necessitated an ab- 
sence of water, so that the Selenites (the in- 
habitants of the Moon), if there were any, must 
evidently possess an organization of a very special 
nature and totally different from ours. 

By means of their improved instruments, the 
astronomers, leaving no part of the Moon's sur- 
face unexplored, went on confirming or disprov- 
ing old discoveries and making new ones. They 
ascertained her diameter to be 2,159.6 miles, 
somewhat more than the quarter of our Earth's; 
her surface to be about 14^ millions of square 
miles, bearing the proportion to that of our 
globe as i to 13; and her volume to be about 
forty-nine times smaller than that of our terres- 
trial abode. They further remarked that the 
Moon, at her full, showed certain portions of 
her disc streaked with white lines, which, at her 
phases changed into corresponding black ones. 
These strange phenomena they puzzled over long 
and carefully, v/ithout coming to any satisfactory 



66 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

conclusion as to their nature or origin. They 
were long narrow furrows, with parallel sides, 
ending generally in the neighborhood of craters, 
their average width being less than a mile, while 
their length varied from ten to a hundred miles. 
The Germans called them Rillen j the French, 
rainures J the English, grooves or clefts j but that 
was all they had for it. Whether they were im- 
mense cracks produced by the cooling of the surface, 
or streams of lava, or dried up beds of ancient 
torrents, nobody could say with any certainty. 

Of this great geological curiosity, the Amer- 
cans were now fully bent on determining the 
nature. They also reserved to themselves the 
task of investigating the famous series of parallel 
ramparts or earth works, claimed to be discovered 
on the Moon's surface by Professor Gruithuysen 
of Munich, who looked on them as a system 
of gigantic fortifications erected by the Selenite 
military engineers. Such points, and many others 
still involved in hopeless obscurity, could evi- 
dently be finally settled only by direct commu- 
nication with the Moon. 

As to the relative intensity of her light, the 
Club knew that they had not much to learn. 
ZoUner's tables had satisfied them that the Sun 
gave more light than half a million full Moons 



THE ROMANCE OF THE MOON. 67 

scattered together all over the sky like stars, if 
there would be room for them. Her heat — as 
Lord Rosse's experiments with his mirror, re- 
flecting the most minute deflections of an ex- 
ceedingly delicate galvanometer, had informed 
them — was of no practical account, as it exerted 
no effect deserving appreciation; and as to the 
ashy light by means of which we see the phe- 
nomenon of *^ The old Moon i7i the yoimg Moon' s 
arfusy'^ they already knew it to be due to the 
earth-shine^ or the sun-light reflected to the 
Moon from the Earth's surface. 

This was about the total amount of positive 
knowledge to which the world had arrived re- 
garding the nature of its satellite, when the 
members of the Gun Club set themselves to 
work to complete it in every point of view, 
whether cosmographical, geological, physical, 
political, or moral. 

The young reader who finds the preceding 
chapter somewhat dull, might mend matters con- 
siderably by going over it again with redoubled 
care and attention. Doing so would certainly 
enable him to enter with greater relish on the 
recital of the tremendous difficulties that the 
enthusiastic Baltimorians were preparing to en- 
counter. 



CHAPTER VI. 

WHICH LADY READERS ARE REQUESTED TO SKIP. 

The immediate effect of Barbican* s proposal 
was to make every body brush up whatever 
astronomical knov/ledge he had ever acquired 
regarding the Moon. All books on the subject 
were in immediate and universal demand. You 
would think it was the first time she had ever 
appeared in the sky. Nobody could see enough 
of her. She became the rage, and I must say 
that, for a ^*star,'' she behaved herself with 
remarkable modesty. The newspapers were full 
of paragraphs learned, brilliant and sentimental, 
and sometimes very much otherwise, on the in- 
exhaustible subject. The humorists filled their 
almanacks with jokes about her ; when the lec- 
turers announced her as their subject, the audi- 
ence had not sufficient standing room : in short, 
all America, as the New York Herald wittily 
phrased it, had *^Moon on the brain.'* 

No wonder then if the monthlies and the 

quarterlies soon teemed with heavy articles on 

^' Nodes, ^^ ^^ Librations,'^ and " Syiiodical revolu- 
(68) 



LADY READERS ARE REQUESTED TO SKIP. 69 

ttons,'' or if the New York Weekly Bulletin, 
with its circulation of 420,000, escaped immedi- 
ate destruction only by interrupting its great 
story of '^ Grim Dick, the one-eyed Robber,^^ in 
its 75th chapter, to make room for a series of 
articles on the ^' Ltmar Farallax,^^ by an emi- 
nent professor of Yale College. In a word, a 
flood of science overwhelmed the land, and from 
one end of it to the other there was no true 
born Yankee to be found, man or woman, who 
was not ready to seize you by the button, and 
tell you in five minutes more about the Moon, 
than you had perhaps ever learned before in all 
the days of your life. 

For instance, if you had forgotten how the 
distance from the Earth to the Moon is calcu- 
lated, they told you it was easily got by meas- 
uring the Lunar parallax, that by this method 
the mean distance was ascertained to be a little 
less than 240 thousand miles, and that, if you 
had any doubt on the subject, they could con- 
vince you by the simplest laws of trigonometry 
that the astronomer's greatest possible error could 
not amount to more than 70 miles at the ut- 
most. Thereupon, they told you, whether you 
desired the information or not, that the Moon 
has two separate and distinct motions, one 



70 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

around her own axis, and the other around the 
Earth, both being accomplished in exactly the 
same time, about 2Tyi days, the period of the 
sidereal revolution. At this should you unfor- 
tunately, through mistaken politeness, feign an 
interest you were far from feeling, they took 
advantage of the opportunity to assure you that 
the rotation of the Moon around her axis 
caused her days and her nights to be of equal 
length, each a half month long. The face 
turned towards the Earth, however, they hastened 
to inform you, did not suffer as much as might 
be expected from a night of such unconsciona- 
ble duration, as all that time the Earth illumi- 
nated it with an intensity equal to that of 
thirteen full moons. As for the other face, 
^^ ne'er of human eye beheld/* for fourteen 
mortal days its night lasted of absolute dark- 
ness, dense and dismal, unless it was tempered 
by the 

" Gloomy splendor of the pallid stars." 

Supposing that you were of too practical a turn 
to relish poetry, and accordingly asked how it 
could happen that the Moon, whilst revolving 
on her axis, invariably kept the same face 
turned towards the Earth, they were down on 
you like lightning with a reply prosaic enough. 



LADV READERS ARE REQUESTED TO SKIP. 71 

^' Go into your dining room/' they cried; 
''walk round your dining table in such a way as 
to keep your eyes always fixed on its centre. 
When you have turned around it once, you will 
have turned around yourself also, since you will 
have faced every point of the room in succes- 
sion. Well ! the room is the sky, the table is 
the Sun, and you are the Moon yourself TV 
In their delight, however, at the aptness of the 
comparison, they never forgot to add that, speak- 
ing with rigid exactness, in consequence of a 
certain vibratory movement of the Moon termed 
'' libration,*' she shows somewhat more than the 
half of her disc, about 57 per cent, on an 
average. 

Though they had by this time crammed you 
with as much knowledge regarding the rotation 
of the Moon on her axis as could be conveni- 
ently held even by the Director of the Cam- 
bridge University, they had no notion whatever 
of letting you off without enlightening you 
further on the nature of her motion around the 
Earth. This time they compared the '' starry 
firmament on high" to a vast dial plate upon 
which the Moon marks the days of the lunar 
month by her varying phases; observing that 
she is full when the Moon and the Sun are in 



72 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

opposition, that is, in opposite parts of the 
heavens ; that she is new when they are in 
conjunction, that is, nearly together; and that 
she is in her first or last quarter^ when lines 
from the Sun and the Moon, meeting in the 
earth, there form a right angle. 

A suppressed yawn accompanied by a gentle 
hint that you had read something like this long 
ago in your school books, would have very little 
effect. Alarmed lest you had forgotten all about 
the theory of eclipses, they hastened to remind 
you that in conjunction the Moon could eclipse 
the Sun, in opposition the Earth could eclipse 
the Moon, and that if these eclipses did not 
take place twice a month, it was all owing to 
the fact that the Sun and the Moon do not 
follow exactly the same path in the heavens. 

This remark, of course, brought on another 
as to what path the Moon does follow. The 
Cambridge letter had been sufficiently explicit 
on this point, but the temptation to spread 
himself would be too great for your informant 
to resist. '^ As the Moon,*' he would say, 
^^ never comes further north than 28 degrees 
from the equator, and never goes further south 
than a corresponding distance, it is evident that 
the grand experiment can be made only in 



LADY READERS ARE REQUESTED TO SKIP. 73 

countries lying within those parallels. Baltimore, 
being in 39"^, Philadelphia, in 40°, and New 
York, in 41° north latitude, these cities can 
never be taken as the scene of operation. A 
projectile shot perpendicularly from either of 
these localities could not possibly reach the 
Moon, her path lying too far south. A projec- 
tile shot obliquely would be too much clogged 
at the start by the earth's attraction ever to 
reach its destination. No, no, my dear sir, 
the success of the experiment imperatively de- 
mands that the cannon shall be placed in a 
spot over which the Moon comes exactly ver- 
tical. In such a spot alone, sir, the thing has 
got to be done, but where that spot is, I am 
not just now quite prepared to say." 

Here your informant, very probably the intel- 
ligent proprietor of a cigar store, or, still more 
likely, an enthusiastic Lady Teacher of the 
Public Schools, seeing the physical impossibility 
of detaining you any longer, would at last let 
you off with a parting shot : "As for the line 
described by the Moon around the earth, every 
child attending a primary school knows that it 
is, not a circle, but an ellipse, as by the laws 
of mechanics it is bound to be. Now, as the 
Earth occupies one of the foci of this ellipse, 



74 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

it is clear as the noonday Sun, that the Moon 
must be much nearer to us at her perigee than 
at her apogee — excuse me for talking so scien- 
tifically — I mean, at one portion of the month 
than at the other.*' 

Then you made off, staggering under your 
load of knowledge. 

In spite, however, of the universal enlighten- 
ment on every subject connected with the Moon, 
some excentric spirits entertained notions of 
their own, which, either from an affectation of 
singularity or a love of contradiction, they 
would freely ventilate on every possible occa- 
sion. One, for instance, would gravely tell you 
that the Moon was nothing but an old burned 
out comet, ^^ played out'* was his exact expres- 
sion, and he triumphantly pointed to her vol- 
canic aspect in proof of his assertion. It was 
useless to tell him that a fatal objection to his 
theory lay in the fact that the Moon has no 
atmosphere, whereas comets always have one. 
This reply might ^^ shut him up '' for the 
moment, but at the very next scientific discus- 
sion, his pet theory was enunciated with all the 
solemnity due to a profound truth when first 
revealed to mankind. 

Another genius, of the timid and self-tor- 



LADV READERS ARE REQUESTED TO SKIP. lb 

menting order, a graduate of the Philadelphia 
High School, with a laudable thirst for self im- 
provement regarding the great question of the 
day, had taken to reading Proctor's various 
astronomical works, and the result may be 
readily guessed. In his honest efforts to under- 
stand the various diagrams illustrative of sidereal 
revolution, syzygy, annual equatio?i, oscillatory 
variation, parallactic inequality, and similar ab- 
strusities, his poor brain had completely given 
way, and he now remained a hopeless idiot 
with one fixed idea in his head to the utter 
exclusion of everything else. This was, that as 
the velocity of the Moon's motion around the 
earth was constantly accelerating, the distance 
between the two bodies should therefore be con- 
stantly diminishing^ and that consequently the 
day was fast approaching when the Moon should 
pop down on us and crush us all to pieces. 
This alarming notion he seemed to entertain 
with positive delight, and he took care to 
propagate it everywhere. *^ What a capital 
joke " he would exclaim, rubbing his hands 
and chuckling gleefully, *^ for those fellows of 
the Gun Club to try to get to the Moon ! Let 
them only wait a while, and they will make 
her acquaintance a little too soon for their 



76 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

comfort ! Yes, soon and sudden she will come 
it with a rush, and knock every mother's son 
of us into a cocked hat !" Everybody, of course, 
knew that all this had been often said before, 
and that Laplace had settled the matter conclu- 
sively by showing how the Moon's acceleration 
is self-compensating, or, if not quite so, that 
millions of years must elapse before the slightest 
collision can ensue. But you might quote Lap- 
lace to our alarmist till you were black in the 
face. He would pit Adams against him as later 
and therefore better authority, and really the 
crazy fellow had altogether such a method in 
his madness, that he terrified many even of 
those heretics hardened enough to make open 
profession of disbelief in the oracles of ^' Old 
Probabilities." 

The most numerous of all the dissenters were 
the ignorant and superstitious classes, abundant 
enough in other countries, and not yet altogether 
suppressed in the United States. These worthies 
despised all books, observations, and calculations 
whatsoever, and took a pride in denouncing 
them as all stuff and humbug. They even pre- 
tended to thank heaven for their ignorance, 
and heaven knows they had quite enough to 
be thankful for. Their self sufficiency, how^ever, 



LADY READERS ARE REQUESTED TO SKIP. 11 

did not prevent them from believing firmly in 
''Mediums," ''Clairvoyants/' and "Astrologers/' 
They saw in every change of the INtoon a warn- 
ing of something that was going to happen very 
soon, a revolution, an earthquake, a murder, a 
marriage, a robbery, a railway accident, the 
breaking up of a "Ring," the birth of a boy, the 
birth of a girl, a fire, or the failure of a great 
financial house that plunged thousands of fami- 
lies into ruin. No matter what happened, 
"Hadn't they told you so?" The worst of it 
was that they never "told you so" until the 
thing had become the common talk, and every 
body else knew everything about it. 

But all opponents put together, whether para- 
doxists, or alarmists, or invincibly ignorants, 
were a mere drop in the bucket, when com- 
pared with the numbers that ranged themselves 
solid and determined around the great enter- 
prise undertaken by the Gun Club. Ninety- 
nine out of every hundred were thoroughly 
"sound on the goose," to use the expression 
employed by an enthusiastic Philadelphia depu- 
tation ; and from this time forward the leading 
and all-absorbing idea of the country was to 
annex as soon as possible the beautiful Queen 
of the Night to the territory of the United 



78 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

States, and to plant the glorious flag of the 
Stars and Stripes on the summit of her loftiest 
mountain. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE MATERIAL OF THE BULLET. 

The astronomical side of the question being 
settled, the mechanical remained. This, of 
course, was the real trouble, and in any other 
country the enormous practical difficulties it pre- 
sented would have been insurmountable. In 
America it was rather play than work to con- 
quer them. 

The indefatigable Barbican without losing an 
instant had nominated an executive Committee, 
which, in three separate sessions, was to decide 
on the three great points of interest; the gun, 
the projectile, and the powder. The members 
of this committee were four in number: Barbi- 
can himself; General Morgan, the hero of Fort 
Walker ; Major Elphinstone, the inventor of the 
Elphinstone Torpedo; and Mr. J. T. Marston, 
already well known to us as the inventor of the 
great cannon-mortar that had burst, and blown up 
a whole street in Baltimore. They met on the 
evening of October 9th, at Barbican's residence, 

137 North Hanover Street. As it was important 

(79) 



80 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

that the inner man should not suffer during 
what promised to be a lengthy discussion, a 
box of very fine Fartagas lay on the table, 
and, by touching a bell, hot coffee and rolls 
were immediately furnished by a dumb waiter, 
in a corner of the room, without any interven- 
tion whatever of servants. 

Barbican, as President, opened the meeting. 

'' The question before us this evening, gentle- 
men,'* he commenced, ^^ is to resolve one of 
the most difficult problems presented by Ballis- 
tics, that great and fascinating science to the 
especial study of which we have devotedly con- 
secrated so much of our thought and so much 
of our time." 

*' Hear ! Hear !" cried Marston. 

*^ Should it meet your approbation,*' con- 
tinued the President, '' I propose that, instead 
of beginning with the cannon, ." 

*^0h! the cannon first, by all means!" cried 
General INIorgan. 

^^ Instead of beginning with the cannon," con- 
tinued Barbican, not heeding the interruption, 
*' I propose that we commence first with the 
bullet, since it is evidently upon the dimensions 
of the projectile that those of the cannon de- 
pend." 



THE MATERIAL OF THE BULLET. 81 

^^ I wish to make a few remarks on this 
subject, gentlemen," said Marston, suddenly 
starting up; ''I want to say a few words on 
the bullet in a moral point of view. I now 
leave altogether out of the question the physical 
bullet, the killing bullet, the terrible element of 
destruction. We are done with that now, and 
probably forever. I mean the scientific bullet, 
the mathematical bullet, the moral bullet, the 
bullet we shall send to the Moon, the bullet that 
is to be our ambassador to the celestial spheres ! 
In this bullet I see the most sublime instance 
of human power. In it, I see that in which 
man has brought himself nearest to his Creator !^' 
^^ Hurrah !'' cried the audience. 
*' Yes !" continued the orator, warming up ; 
*' God has made the stars, and the suns, and 
the planets; and man has made the bullet, a 
star, a sun, a planet in itself, though, I admit, 
on a very small scale. To our Creator the 
glory of the velocity of light, of electricity, of 
the stars, of the comets, of the planets, of the 
satellites, of the plunging cataract, of the roar- 
ing hurricane ! But to us, gentlemen, the glory 
of the velocity of the bullet, a hundred times 
faster than the fleetest steed that ever spurned 

earth with flying hoof, a hundred times swifter 
6 



82 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

than the rapidest train that ever skimmed over 
the glassy surface of a steel railroad !" 

The orator had now lifted himself up to the 
full dignity of his subject, and his words flowed 
on with the impetuosity oi a noble river. 

'^ Do you want proofs of what I advance ?'* 
he continued. *' You shall have them, in figures 
that never lie ! in figures of burning eloquence ! 
Take a simple twenty-four-pounder. It moves, 
it is true, 800 thousand times slower than elec- 
tricity, 640 thousand times slower than light, 76 
times slower than the Earth in her orbit, still, 
at the moment that it leaves the cannon, its 
velocity exceeds that of sound — once you hear 
the report your life is safe — it travels 1200 feet 
in a second, 12,000 feet in ten seconds, 14 
miles in a minute, 840 miles in an hour, more. 
than 20 thousand miles in a day — almost equal 
to the equatorial rotation of the Earth — and 
nearly seven and a half millions of miles in a 
year. It would, therefore, take only eleven days 
to reach the Moon, twelve years to hit the 
Sun, and 360 years to arrive at Neptune on the 
extreme verge of our solar system. That is 
what our modest twenty-four-pounder can easily 
do. But what should I say of it, if, increasing 
its velocity thirty fold, we discharge it with a 



THE MATERIAL OF THE BULLET, 83 

rapidity of seven miles in a single -second ! 
Oh noble bullet, glorious projectile ! I love to 
think on the honors that await thee in yonder 
luminary, who shall embrace thee with delight, 
as the lordly ambassador of her sister sphere !" 

Warm applause greeted the orator as he sat 
down wiping his forehead after this eloquent 
burst, but the President cut it somewhat short 
by observing dryly : 

** From beautiful poetry we must now descend 
to humble prose. The question before us is 
how we are to impart to a projectile a velocity 
of 12,000 yards, or seven miles a second. I 
have reason to think that we can do it. 
First, however, it may help matters to see what 
are the greatest velocities hitherto attained. 
General Morgan may be able to enlighten us a 
little on the subject." 

*'Yes,'' replied the General, '^ being on the 
Experiment Committee during the War, I had 
many opportunities to get thoroughly posted on 
the subject. I shall begin by stating that the 
Dahlgren hundred-pounder threw a ball a dis- 
tance of nearly three miles with an initial veloc- 
ity of 500 yards to the second.'* 

'^ Very well. And the Rodman Columbiad ?" 
asked the President. 



84 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

'' The Rodman Columbiad, tested at Fort 
Hamilton, near New York, threw a ball weigh- 
ing a thousand pounds a distance of six miles, 
with an initial force of 800 yards to the second, 
a result never attained either by Armstrong or 
Palliser in England.'' 

*^ And not likely to be either!'* exclaimed 
Marston. *^ Johnny Bull is too clumsy with fire 
arms not to be afraid of blowing himself up !" 

'^ So then," resumed Barbican, '^800 yards a 
second is the highest initial velocity attained up 
to the present time?" 

^^ Correct," nodded Morgan. 

*^ Ah !" exclaimed Marston, 'Mf that mortar 
of mine had not burst ." 

^' But it did burst, you know," replied Bar- 
bican, waiving further discussion by a kindly 
gesture. ^^ Let us take then for our starting 
point this initial velocity of 800 yards. This 
must be increased at least 15 times, and reserv- 
ing for another sitting the discussion of the 
means capable of producing such a velocity, we 
shall now consider, my friends, what are the 
dimensions required by our bullet. Of course, 
it is clear that mere 1,000-pounders are not 
worth wasting breath on." 

** Why not?" asked the Major. 



THE MATERIAL OF THE BULLET. 85 

^* Because/' cut in Marston, ^' the bullet must 
be big enough to . attract the attention of the 
Lunarians, if there be any.*' 

*' Exactly/' resumed the President, ^^ and for 
another reason perhaps still more important. 
Sending off a bullet and giving ourselves no 
further trouble about it, would be making the 
whole thing end in a bottle of smoke. No, 
we must make a bullet big enough for us to 
follow its track until it reaches its object.'* 

^^ How !" cried the Major, beginning to feel 
a little mystified. *^ Follow its track ! Why, 
you must contemplate a bullet of the most in- 
ordinate and stupendous dimensions!" 

*^ Not at all," replied the President calmly. 
^' Just listen a moment. Optical instruments, 
you are aware, have reached a very high degree 
of perfection. With certain telescopes a power 
of 6,000 has been obtained, and, consequently, 
the Moon has been brought, so to speak, within 
forty miles of us. Now at tha^ distance objects 
measuring sixty feet each way are pefectly visi- 
ble. If the defining power of telescopes has 
not been further advanced, it is because what 
is gained in power is lost in clearness, as the 
Moon's light is too feeble to struggle through the 
atmospheric undulations with sufficient intensity." 



86 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

'^ What do you propose doing then ?*' asked 
the General. '' Would you give your bullet a 
diameter of sixty feet?'* 

'' Oh, no !" 

*' Will you undertake to give the Moon's 
light more intensity?" 

'' Exactly so/' 

** Oh, come down !'' laughed Marston. 
'^That's too good !'' 

'' Nothing simpler,'* replied Barbican. ^' If 
I diminish the density of our atmosphere, 
shall I not render the Moon's light more in- 
tense ?" 

" Of course." 

'^ Well, to do so, I shall simply carry 
my telescope to the top of some high moun- 
tain." 

'^ By Jove, that's so!" cried Marston. ^* Bar- 
bican, you are a trump." 

^' I give up gracefully," said the Major. 
*« But — let us see — what power do you expect to 
gain by doing so ?" 

^^ A power of 48,000, which will bring the 
Moon within the short distance of five miles. 
At this distance it is easy to distinguish objects 
of nine feet in diameter." 

*' Splendid !" cried Marston. '' Our bullet 



THE MATERIAL OF THE BULLET, 87 

then should be only nine feet in diameter ! 
Go it while you're young !" 

^' Nine feet in diameter/' said Barbican, sen- 
tentiously. 

^^ Oh ! come, Barbican/' cried Elphinstone, ^'a 
bullet of such dimensions should weigh ." 

^^ Before discussing its weight, Major," inter- 
rupted Barbican, *^ allow me to remind you a 
little of what our forefathers have done in this 
line. Though I'm far from denying that gunnery 
has made some progress, it is no harm to 
know that in the Middle Ages results were ob- 
tained which even in the nineteenth century 
would be very surprising." 

>^ For instance?" demanded the audience, in- 
credulously. 

*^ For instance ;" continued Barbican. ^* At 
the siege of Constantinople, in 1453, by Mahomet 
II., stone bullets were discharged, weighing as 
much as 1,900 pounds. In 1565, at the siege 
of Malta by the Sultan Solyman, a cannon from 
Fort St. Ehuo is said to have thrown at the 
Turks projectiles weighing 2,500 pounds. A 
French historian says that, in the reign of Louis 
XL, about 1470, a shell weighing 500 pounds 
was shot from the Bastille to Charenton, a dis- 
tance of nearly three miles. What have we got 



88 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

since that time ? Armstrong's best, his ^ Big 
WilV discharged a ball weighing only 510 
pounds, and Rodman's famous 20-inch bore 
fired a solid shot of little more than double 
that weight. Our projectiles, therefore, seem to 
have lost in weight what they have gained in 
range. What we have to do, then, and 
what would seem only reasonable enough to ex- 
pect with the progress of science, is simply to 
increase ten fold, the weight of the bullets dis- 
charged by Mahomet II., and by the Knights 
of Malta." 

/* That's clear enough," said the Major; ^^but 
what metal do you intend using for the projec- 
tile ?" 

^^ Plain cast iron, I should think, would be 
good enough,'' observed the General. 

*^ Plain cast iron!" exclaimed Marston ; ''can't 
we send something better than that to the 
Moon?" 

'' Plain cast iron is good enough for any 
bullet, my worthy friend," said the Gene- 
ral ; '' only a ball of such dimensions as 
nine feet in diameter must have an enormous 
weight." 

''Yes, if it is solid," said Barbican; "but 
not, if it is hollow." 



THE MATERIAL OF THE BULLET 89 

" Hollow ? Would you think of sending a 
shell?" 

^' Why not?" broke in Marston. ^^ A shell 
containing newspapers, the President's message, 
and specimens of our cotton, sugar and to- 
bacco, would make Europe howl with envy !" 

"Yes, a shell," replied Barbican. "Nothing 
else would do. A solid shot would weigh more 
than 200 thousand pounds, a weight not to be 
entertained for a moment ; however, as the pro- 
jectile must possess a certain stability, I pro- 
pose giving it a weight of about lo tons." 

"What is to be the thickness of its sides?" 
asked the Major. 

" According to the ordinary rule in such 
cases," replied the General, " a diameter of 
nine feet requires a wall or side a least two 
feet thick." 

" Oh, that is by far too much," observed 
Barbican. " Remember, the question is not 
about a bullet intended to pierce iron clads j 
it w411 be quite enough if the sides are suffi- 
ciently thick to resist the pressure exerted by 
the powder at the discharge. Here, then, is 
the whole thing in a nut shell. What must be 
the thickness of a cast iron shell, nine feet in 
diameter, to weigh about 20 thousand pounds ? 



90 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

Our friend Marston, the lightning calculator, can 
tell us in a few moments/' 

'' Certainly/* said Marston, scribbling down 
some figures, and evidently going through a very 
easy calculation. ^^ The sides of such a shell 
must not be more than two inches thick/' 

'MVill that be sufficient?" asked the Major 
doubtingly. 

^' No, certainly not," said Barbican. 

*^ What is to be done then ?" resumed the 
Major, rather embarrassed. 

^^ Give up iron, use another metal," said 
Barbican. 

^^ Copper?" asked Morgan. 

^^ Still too heavy," said the President: ''I 
know something better than either iron or cop- 
per." \ 

'' Let us have it," said the Major. 

^^ Aluminium," replied Barbican. 

^^ Aluminium!" exclaimed his three colleagues 
in one breath. 

^^ Aluminium, no less, my friends," Barbican 
went on. '^ You are no doubt aware, that, in 
1854, Sainte Claire De Ville, a distinguished 
French Chemist, succeeded in obtaining this 
precious metal in pure masses. Now, aluminium 
is at once as white as silver, as incorrodible as 



THE MATERIAL OF THE BULLET. 91 

gold, as tenacious as iron, as fusible as copper, 
and as light as glass. It is easily worked ; it 
is widely spread in nature, alumina forming the 
bases of most rocks ; it is three times lighter 
than iron ; in short, it seems to have been 
created expressly to furnish material for our 
projectile !'* 

^' Good for aluminium !'* cried the excitable 
Marston. 

^^ But, President,'* asked the Major, *Ms not 
aluminium rather expensive?" 

*' It was, once,'* answered Barbican. ^^ When 
first discovered, it cost about 270 dollars a 
pound ; then it fell to 27 dollars, and to-day 
a pound of aluminium is worth about 9 dollars.*' 

*^ Still, nine dollars a pound," remonstrated 
the Major, '^ I consider an enormous price." 

'' Enormous, I admit, my dear Major ; but 
that it is beyond our means, I deny." 

^' Have you any idea of the weight of such 
a projectile ?" asked General Morgan. 

'^ Oh, yes," replied Barbican, holding up a 
paper covered with figures : *^ a. shell nine feet 
in diameter, and one foot thick, if cast iron, 
would weigh 67,440 pounds ; if made of alumi- 
nium, its weight would be reduced to 19,250 
pounds." 



92 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

*^ Almost 3^ times lighter !'* cried Marston 
delighted. 

^^ Very satisfactory, indeed/' observed the 
Major, '' but still 19,250 pounds at nine dollars 
a pound /* 

'' Will cost exactly ^173,250 ;*' interrupted 
Barbican. '' A pretty round sum, I grant. But 
don't be alarmed, my friends. Nil desperan- 
duin — never give up the ship ! Our enterprise 
shall not fail for want of funds, depend upon 
it.'' 

^' Funds !" echoed Marston. *^ We shall be 
deluged with money !" 

^^ Then, gentlemen," asked the President, be- 
fore taking his seat, '' what do you think of 
aluminium ?'' 

*' The idea is a good one,'* said the General. 

^^ It is unanimously adopted !" cried the two 
others with one voice. 

The committee then broke up, having resolved 
the question for the first session in a highly 
satisfactory manner. The material of the bullet 
was to be aluminium, its nature and weight 
were decided on ; and the kind of cannon 
proper to discharge it, was to be settled at the 
next session. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



THE CANNON. 



The minutes of the Executive Committee's first 
session, when read next day in the Club Rooms, 
produced a feeling of great surprise strongly 
dashed with alarm, particularly among the older 
members of the Standing Committee. ^^ What ! 
A ball weighing twenty thousand pounds ! Pre- 
posterous ! What kind of cannon could be de- 
vised capable of imparting the necessary velocity 
to such an enormous mass?'* To this and 
sundry questions of similar import, the proceed- 
ings of the second session were to furnish a 
triumphant reply. 

The four members met punctually next even- 
ing, and business commenced without preamble. 

^^ Gentlemen,'' said Barbican, after calling 
them to order, ^^ this evening we have to con- 
sider the nature of our cannon, its length, 
shape, arrangement, and weight. Its dimensions 
will probably be gigantic, but I think I can 
take it on myself to say, that we shall not be 

frightened at the difficulties that may be pre- 

(93) 



94 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

sented by its construction. I bespeak your best 
attention to the few remarks I am going to 
make, and I hope you will have no hesitation 
in stating your objections. For, candidly speak- 
ing, I think I can answer them.'* 

An approving murmur greeted these words. 

'^Taking up the question,*' resumed the Presi- 
dent, ^*at the point where we left off last even- 
ing, the problem we have now to solve may be 
presented in the following words : * How to 
impart an mitiai velocity of 12,000 yards a 
second to a shell nifie feet in diameter, and 
20,000 pounds in weight?^ '' 

*^ That's exactly what we have got to do !" 
observed Marston. 

'^ Now,'* resumed the President, ^Met us con- 
sider what happens as soon as a projectile is 
launched into space. It is acted upon by three 
independent forces at once : the resistance of 
the medium through which it passes, the attrac- 
tion of the Earth, and the impelling force that 
has set it in motion. Let us examine them 
separately. The resistance offered by the medium, 
that is the air, is of very little importance. 
In fact, it may be considered almost insignificant 
when we reflect that, the atmosphere being no- 
where more than about 50 miles in thickness. 



THE CANNON'. 95 

the projectile would get through it in six or 
seven seconds. Let us now pass on to the 
second resisting force — the attraction of the 
Earth. This, we know, diminishes according to 
the • square of the distance ; and we further 
know that a body, unsupported, falls to the 
earth at the rate of i6 feet the first second. 
A little calculation readily tells us that this 
same body, if transferred to the same distance 
from us as the Moon, would fall only about 
the 2V o^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^ ^^^^ same time.'* 

*^ Right, President," cried Marston, rapidly 
figuring with paper and pencil. ^' Sixteen feet 
divided by the square of the Moon's distance, 
brings us so near ^V o^ ^^ i^ch that the differ- 
ence is not worth speaking of." 

'^ This motion of gV ^^ ^^ mch in a second 
of time," continued Barbican, ^^ is almost equiv- 
alent to a state of immobility. The question, then, 
is to conquer this force of gravity. How to do 
it? Simply by augmenting the impelling power." 

''Yes, but that's the rub," observed the Major. 

''It is indeed the rub, but not an invincible 
rub," replied Barbican. " For we can obtain 
all the impelling power that is necessary, by 
increasing the length of the cannon and the 
strength of the powder, as the quantity of the 



96 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

latter is evidently limited only by the engine's 
capacity of resistance. Now this power of re- 
sistance we can increase to almost any extent, 
since the cannon, as it is not to be handled, 
need not be exposed/' 

^^ Yes, that is evident,'' observed General 
Morgan. 

''Up to the present time," Barbican went 
on, '' the largest cannons, our own enormous 
Columbiads, have never exceeded twenty-five feet 
in length ; so I think we shall rather astonish 
folks by the dimensions that we are compelled 
to adopt." 

'' Exactly so, Mr. President," cried Marston. 
'' I have been figuring at the thing myself, and 
have reached results, which, last night, I ac- 
knowledge, I should be the first to laugh at. 
But you opened my eyes both to the grandeur 
of our undertaking, and to the consequent gran- 
deur of the means to be employed. My con- 
viction is that we shall want a cannon half a 
mile long." 

'' Half a mile long !" exclaimed the Major 
and the General with one voice. 

'' That, at least," cried Marston, '' and even 
then I'm afraid it would not be half long 
enough." 




marston's first draft of the gun. 



THE CANNON. 97 

'^ Come, come, Marston,'* remonstrated the 
Major ; '^ if this is meant as a joke, I must 
say it is a capital one, and I enjoy it hugely. 
Ha! Ha! Ha!" 

'' It*s no joke whatever," cried Marston, get- 
ting red; ^'and allow me to say. Major Elphin- 
stone, you permit yourself to make observations 
quite uncalled for." 

'^ Marston, that^s carrying the joke too far." 
^^ No further than your torpedo carried the 
ConshoJiocken, * ' 

(During the war the Major had unfortunately 
mistaken the United States Gunboat Consho- 
hocken for a Confederate cruiser, and blown it 
to pieces with his patent torpedo.) 

" Further than your famous cannon, the ter- 
ror of Baltimore, ever carried a ball !" 

^' Gentlemen, remember you're not in Con- 
gress," exclaimed General Morgan, laughing 
heartily, for he knew his friends' sore points. 
^^ No personalities allov/ed in the Gun Club ! 
Besides we are forgetting the respect due to 
our honored President." The honest artillery- 
men's ill humor vanished in a moment. They 
shook hands, made apologies, and humbly 
begged the President's pardon. 

Barbican, so deeply immersed in his calcula- 



98 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

tions as to be hardly aware of what was going 
on, listened to his colleagues for an instant or 
two, and then calmly resumed : 

** Now, friends, let us reason a little. We 
evidently require a cannon of great length, since 
the elastic force of the gases accumulated under 
the projectile is thereby greatly increased. But 
beyond certain limits it is absolutely useless to 
pass.^' 

*^ Absolutely,*' chimed in the Major. 
^* Now, what is the formula prescribed in such 
cases ? Ordinarily a cannon^ s length is twenty- 
five times the diameter of the ball, and its 
weight is from 235 to 240 times greater.'* 

^' That formula doesn't apply here !" cried 
Marston impetuously. 

^* Granted, my worthy friend," replied Barbi- 
can, ^' still the formula is not without its 
utility. Taking the proportions it prescribes for 
a projectile nine feet in diameter, and 20,000 
pounds in weight, our gun would be only 225 
feet long, and would weigh no more than about 
S million pounds." 

*^ Fudge 1" roared Marston. ^^ Better take a 
pocket pistol at once !" 

'' You're right, Mr. Secretary," replied Barbi- 
can. ^' I quite agree with you, and for that 



THE CANNON. 99 

reason I propose making our cannon at least 
four times longer, that is about nine hundred 
feet in length.** 

The Major and the General objected on the 
one side, and Marston on the other for some 
time ; but each party supported his own view 
so warmly, that after a while, the President had 
little trouble in convincing his colleagues, that 
his. Barbican' s, proposal hit the happy medium ; 
so a length of nine hundred feet was at last 
unanimously adopted. 

'* Now then,** asked Elphinstone, *^ what is 
to be the thickness of the metal?'* 

^' Six feet," replied Barbican. 

*^ Of course, you don't think of mounting 
such an enormous weight of metal upon a car- 
riage ?'* asked the Major. 

** Yet the idea is sublime !** cried Marston. 

'^ But useless and impracticable,** replied Bar- 
bican. '* No ; I think of casting this cannon 
in the earth itself. By binding it with thick 
hoops of forged iron, and surrounding it with 
a solid piece of masonry, I think we shall suc- 
ceed in rendering bursting almost impossible. 
As soon as the piece is cast, the chamber will 
be measured, smoothed, and polished with great 
care in order that no loss of gas may occur 



100 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

through windage, and that the whole explosive 
force of the powder may be employed in im- 
pelling the ball/' 

<^ Hurrah !" cried Marston. *^ We have our 
cannon !" 

*^ Not yet, my friend/' said Barbican. ^'Re- 
member we have not yet said a word as to its 
shape. Shall it be a cannon, a howitzer, or a 
mortar ?" 

*' A cannon!" cried General Morgan. 
'^ A howitzer!" cried INIajor Elphinstone. 
'^ A mortar!" cried iMarston. 
As each seemed fully impressed with the 
peculiar advantages of his favorite arm, a new 
and lengthened discussion seemed imminent, but 
the President nipped it in the bud. 

" Gentlemen/' said he, " you will all agree 
with each other in a moment if you only listen 
to what I am going to say. Our Columbiad 
will unite in itself the properties of all three. 
It will be a cannon, since its chamber will be 
of the same diameter as its bore. It will be a 
howitzer, as it discharges a shell. And it will 
be a mortar, as it will be pointed at an angle 
of 90 degrees. Solidly fixed in its unyielding 
bed, no recoil possible, no waste possible, it 
will communicate to the projectile the totality 



THE CANNON. 101 

of the enormous force accumulated in its in- 
terior/' 

*^* Agreed !*' cried his colleagues with one 
voice. 

<' One moment/' added the Major ; '^ shall our 
can-how-mortar be rifled ?" 

'^ Oh, no;*' answered Barbican. "We re- 
quire a tremendous initial velocity, which, as 
you are well aware, a rifled bore would only 
diminish/' 

" True.'' 

" Now then we have it, I hope 1" cried 
Marston, 

" Not quite." 

"Why not?" 

" Because we have not said a word about the 
metal it is to be made of." 

" Propose the question at once then !" 

" That is exactly what I am going to do," 
replied Barbican. " Gentlemen, our cannon 
must unite great tenacity with great hardness ; 
it must be perfectly proof against heat, oxida- 
tion, and the corrosive action of acids." 

" Of that there is no doubt," said the 
Major ; " and as we must employ an immense 
quantity of metal, I think we are rather limited 
as to choice." 



102 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

^^ Then,'* said Morgan, ^' I propose the best 
alloy yet known for our purpose ; a hundred 
parts of copper, twelve of tin, and six of brass." 

** I agree with you, my dear General," re- 
plied the President, ^^in thinking that this com- 
position has produced very satisfactory results. 
But, in our case, it would be both too dear 
and too hard to get. I propose, therefore, taking 
something good but less expensive, for instance 
cast iron. What is your opinion, Major?" 

*^ I am rather inclined to agree with you, 
Mr. President." 

*^ In fact," resumed Barbican, ''while cast 
iron is ten times cheaper than bronze, it is 
easily melted, flows readily, and gives very little 
trouble in working. That is, it saves us both 
time and money. Besides, it is pretty strong 
too. I remember myself, when operating with 
Sherman against Hood, near Atlanta, that some 
of our cast iron cannons fired as many as a 
thousand rounds with hardly a pause, day or 
night, and then seemed very little the worse 
for it." 

'' Cast iron is very brittle," observed Morgan. 

'' Yes, and very stubborn too," said Barbican. 
''Oh! we shall not burst, if that's what you're 
afraid of." 



THE cannon; 103 

*' The General is anxious about his reputa- 
tion," observed the Major. 

^' He's right too," cried Marston. ^^ Nobody 
but bank presidents can burst, and be honest 
men at the same time." 

*' No bursting is possible in our case," said 
the President decisively ; ^' unless you go wrong 
in your figures, Mr. Secretary, which I think is 
hardly likely. For instance, can anybody be 
quicker or more correct than you in calculating 
the weight of a cannon, nine hundred feet in 
length, nine feet in bore, and six feet in thick- 
ness ?" 

In less than a minute Marston had the work 
done : 

^^ Such a cannon would weigh 68,040 tons." 

*^ And at two cents a pound, this would 
amount to ?" 

*^ It would amount to ^2, 721, 600." 

At this announcement, his three colleagues 
cast a forlorn glance of dismay at their Presi- 
dent, but Barbican' s smile was bland, and his 
voice cheery as he replied : 

'^ I only repeat now what I said yesterday : 
Nil desperandiim — never give up the ship ! Our 
enterprise shall not fail for want of funds." 

The Committee then broke up their second 



104 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

session in the best possible spirits, and promised 
to be punctual in their attendance on the fol- 
lowing evening. 



CHAPTER IX. 



THE POWDER. 



The third question to consider was the kind 
of powder to be employed, and the public at 
large waited its decision with the keenest inter- 
est. The projectile was so enormous, the cannon 
was so gigantic, the necessary quantity of pow- 
der should be of an amount so fabulous, that, 
in spite of the reckless bravery of the 
Americans, something like dismay pervaded the 
popular mind, and people almost shuddered at 
the results both possible and probable from the 
employment on such a vast scale of an agent 
so terrific as gun powder. 

All such legends as attribute the invention of 

powder to Schwartz, the Benedictine monk of 

Freiburg on the Rhine, in the 14th century, 

or to Friar Bacon of Oxford on the Thames, 

in the 13th century, or to the Byzantine monks 

of the 6th century, whose '^ Greek Fire *' gave 

the Greek Empire a new lease of life for nine 

hundred years — I say, — all such legends are to 

be at once discarded. 

(i°5) 



106 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

Nobody knows who invented powder ; its use 
was well understood in China several hundred 
years before the Christian era. Its employment 
as a propellant is probably of more recent date. 
All, however, that it concerns us to know at 
present, is a little regarding its tremendous me- 
chanical force. A few remarks on the subject 
may be enough for the general reader. 

A pound of po\vder occupies a certain space, 
say so many cubic inches. When started into 
gas, it requires a space 400 times greater; when 
this gas is acted upon by a heat of about 
1300° Fahrenheit, it fills a space ten times 
greater still. That is, the volume or size of 
the powder is to the volume of the gas pro- 
duced by its deflagration as i is to 4,000. 
Judge then of the tremicndous explosive action 
of this gas when confined in a place 4,000 
times too small for it. 

This fact and hundreds of others of a similar 
nature, you may be sure, our friends of the 
Executive Committee had at their fingers ends, 
when they took their places at the next meet- 
ing. Barbican called on the Major, in graceful 
recognition of the merits of the famous Elphtn- 
stone torpedo, to open the proceedings. The 
Major at once complied. 



THE POWDER. 107 

^'Gentlemen/' he began, '^ I shall preface ijiy 
remarks by giving some figures taken from the 
Report of the Committee on Artillery. The 
24-pounder, whose execution our honored Secre- 
tary described in such glowing phrases a few 
evenings ago, is impelled by a charge of only 
16 pounds of gun powder. The Armstrong gun 
requires only 75 pounds for an 800-pound pro- 
jectile, and the Rodman Columbiad expends 
only 160 pounds of powder to discharge a ball 
weighing half a ton. ^ 

'^ A self-evident consequence to be deduced 
from these figures," proceeded the Major, ^^ is, 
that the increased weight of the ball does not 
require a corresponding increase in the charge. 
For instance, though a 24-pounder requires 16 
pounds of gun powder — or two-thirds of its own 
weight — a ball weighing 1,000 pounds is very 
far from requiring a charge in the same pro- 
portion. In fact, instead of ()(i6 pounds, or 
two-thirds of its own weight, a charge of 160 
pounds has been found to be quite sufficient. 
In other words, the more rapidly you increase 
the weight of the projectile, the more rapidly 
you diminish the proportional weight of the 
charge." 

'^ Come to the point, Major," interrupted 



108 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

Barbican, who could be long-winded enough 
himself sometimes. 

^^ He's coming to it rapidly/' cried Mars- 
ton. '^ He will convince us presently that, if 
we only make our projectile heavy enough, we 
shall end by requiring no powder at all to dis- 
charge it.'* 

*' I shall consider my friend Marston's knowl- 
edge of gunnery almost as poor as his jokes,'' 
resumed the Major, ^Mf he forgets that during 
the war, in the case of our largest guns, we 
reduced the weight of the powder to the tenth 
of that of the ball.'' 

*^ Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mar- 
ston," said General Morgan; ^' the Major is 
perfectly correct. But before deciding on how 
much powder we are to employ^ I think we 
should first fix on what kzndy 

'^ We shall employ coarse-grained war pow- 
der," replied the Major ; '^ it explodes more 
rapidly than when pulverized." 

^^ Yes," replied the General, '^ but it is very 
hard on the gun, and soon injures the internal 
surface. ' ' 

'* That may be an objection for cannons gen- 
erally," replied the Major, '^ but not for our 
Columbiad. The powder must ignite instanta- 



THE POWDER, ^09 

neously, if we want to have the mechanical 
effect complete. Fine powder burns too slowly.'* 
''To render the combustion more rapid/' ob- 
served Marston, " we might contrive to ignite 
the powder in several places at the same time." 
''We might," said the Major; "undoubtedly 
we might, but the operation would be very 
troublesome. No ; I return to my first idea ; 
coarse-grained war powder avoids all these diffi- 
culties." 

"All right," said his colleagues. 
"To load his Columbiad," resumed the IMajor, 
" Rodman employed a powder in grains as large 
as chestnuts, made of willow charcoal simply 
roasted in iron boilers. This powder was hard 
and lustrous, left no mark on your hand, con- 
tained a great proportion of hydrogen and oxy- 
gen, caught fire instantly, and though violently 
explosive, it was not very hard on the lire arms." 
" Enough said," observed Marston. " Our 
choice is made." 

So far Barbican had held himself almost en- 
tirely aloof from the discussion. He listened, 
and let them talk, evidently having his own ideas 
on the matter. At this point he broke silence. 
" Now, gentlemen," he asked, " what quan- 
tity of powder do you propose ?" 



110 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

The three Committee men looked at each 
other for some time. At last General Morgan 
spoke : 

'* The weight of the projectile being 20, ceo 
pounds, according to !Major Elphinstone^s re- 
marks, a quantity of powder one-tenth that weight 
should be sufficient to discharge it, but since we 
require the enormous initial velocity of 12, coo 
yards a second, instead of taking one-te?ith of 
the weight of the projectile, we should take ten 
times its weight for our charge. Therefore I 
propose 200,000 pounds.*' 

'^ Too little," said the islajor ; ^^ I propose 
500,000 pounds." 

^* Still too little," cried Marston. ^^ Both 
together are too little. I propose Sco.oco pounds 
weight of gun powder to discharge our pro- 
jectile." 

Notwithstanding the enormous power repre- 
sented by these figures, the work to be done 
was enormous, almost beyond calculation. There- 
fore, no one accused Marston of exaggeration 
this time. A general silence ensued for a few 
moments, which was finally broken by the Presi- 
dent : 

''Gentlemen," he said, ''I start with the 
principle that the resistance of a cannon con- 



THE POWDER, 111 

structed as ours is to be, is almost limitless. 
I shall, therefore, perhaps, surprise our honorable 
Secretary by telling him that he has been rather 
timid in his calculations, and I propose to 
double his eight hundred thousand pounds of 
powder. ' ' 

'^ Sixteen hundred thousand pounds !" ex- 
claimed Marston, bouncing off his chair like an 
India rubber ball. 
" Just that much.'* 

'^ Then you will have to fall back on my 
cannon half a mile long," said the Secretary, 
without, however, showing the least sign of 
triumph. ^ 

"That's clear," observed the Major. 
"How so?" asked the General. 
" Clear as daylight !" cried the Secretary, 
reading off some figures that he had been scrib- 
bling on a piece of paper. " i6 hundred thou- 
sand pounds of powder will occupy a space of 
about 2 2 thousand cubic feet ; and as our can- 
non can contain only 54 thousand cubic feet, it 
will be nearly half filled with the charge alone, 
and, of course, it will not be long enough for 
the expansion of the gas necessary to give the 
projectile sufficient impulsion." 

Against this there was absolutely nothing to 



112 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

be said. Marston^s figures were beyond dispute. 
His colleagues looked at Barbican. 

'^ Nevertheless/' observed the President, *^ I 
hold fast to my opinion. Just reflect a moment ; 
1 6 hundred thousand pounds of powder will 
give rise to not much more than 200 million 
cubic feet of gas. Is that too much for our 
purpose?" 

^^ Hardly/' said the General. 

^MVhat is to do then?'' asked the Major. 

^^ Simply reduce the enormous quantity of 
powder/' replied Barbican, '' without diminish- 
ing its mechanical power." 

^^ Yes, that's where the shoe pinches," said 
Marston. 

*' It can't be done," cried the General and 
the Major in one voice. 

^^ Excuse me, gentlemen/' calmly continued 
the President. ^^ It can be done, and I am 
going to tell you how." 

Their eyes devoured him. 

'' In fact there is nothing easier," he went 
on, ^' than to reduce this powder to a volume 
four times less bulky. You are all acquainted 
with the curious substance forming the element- 
ary tissues of plants, and commonly called cellu- 
lose. It is obtained in a perfectly pure state 



THE POWDER. 113 

in several bodies, particularly in cotton or 
the down covering the seeds of the cotton plant. 
Now, cotton steeped for a while in nitric and 
sulphuric acid and left to dry, is transformed 
into a substance eminently insoluble, eminently 
combustible and eminently explosive." 

*^ Oh ! now I understand you !'* cried the 
General and the JMajor, simultaneously. 

^* By Jove, Barbican," roared the delighted 
Marston, ^^ you are a right bower !" 

'* Nearly forty years ago," pursued Barbican, 
^' in 1832, this substance was discovered by a 
French chemist named Braconnot, who called 
it xyioidi?ie. In 1838 Pelouze, another French- 
man, suggested its application to artillery, and 
in 1846 Herr Schonbein, a Basle professor, 
announced to the British Association at one of 
its meetings that he had rendered cotton as ex- 
plosive as gun powder. '' 

*' Look here, Mr. President," interrupted Mars- 
ton, '* is there no American name connected in 
any way with that discovery?" 

^^ Not exactly with the discovery of gun cot- 
ton, my dear Marston," replied the President, 
'' but very closely with one of its most important 
applications. I am happy to gratify your patriotic 
spirit by stating that a countryman of ours, May- 

8 



114 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

nard of Boston, when a medical student in 
1846, discovered collodion^ which is simply gun 
cotton dissolved in a mixture of ether and alco- 
hol. Collodion he highly recommended as likely 
to be of vast service in surgery by its power 
of preserving wounds from contact with the air. 
It has since proved indispensable to photo- 
graphers, as it is the well known white film 
covering the glass when a negative is taken. 
Another French chemist, it is true, also claims 
the honor of this great discovery, but of course 
we are bound to sustain the glory of our own 
countryman.'* 

^^ Of course we are and of course we do,*' 
cried Marston. ^* Hurrah for Maynard and the 
gun cotton !*' 

*^ This powerful explosive agent," resumed the 
President, ^^ is prepared with the greatest ease. 
Cotton steeped for ten or twelve minutes in a 
mixture of sulphuric and nitric acid, then 
thoroughly washed and dried — nothing is sim- 
pler than the whole process. But this is only 
a trifle when compared with its other advantages. 
It is unaffected by moisture — a most valuable 
quality, since it will take us a good many days 
to load our cannon ; it takes fire readily ; and 
its combustion is so rapid that it will flash off 



THE POWDER. 115 

on a pile of gun powder without igniting it. 
Besides, its explosive power is at least four times 
as great as that of gunpowder, and even this 
can be immensely increased by adding to it -^^ 
of its weight of nitrate of potash." 

** Will that be necessary?" asked the Major. 

** Hardly," replied the President. " So then 
instead of 1600 thousand pounds of gunpowder, 
we shall require only 400 thousand pounds of 
gun cotton, and, as 500 pounds of cotton 
can be easily contained in a space of 27 cubic 
feet, the whole charge will occupy only about 
180 linear feet in the Columbiad. Conse- 
quently," concluded the President in a tone at 
once confident and triumphant, " the projectile 
will have about 700 feet length of bore to tra- 
verse under the impulse of 200 million cubic feet 
of gas before it leaves the cannon to wing its 
rapid way towards the radiant Queen of Night !" 

Marston, in his increasing excitement, had been 
latterly growing more and more ungovernable, but 
this flowery peroration of the , President shot 
him oif like a rocket. He flung himself head- 
foremost into Barbican' s arms with a force that 
would have certainly punched a hole in his il- 
lustrious friend had he not really been, as we 
have said before, a cast iron Yankee. 



lie THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

This incident ended the third and last meet- 
ing of the Committee. The plan of the cam- 
paign being now settled in all its chief features, 
henceforth nothing more remained to be done 
than to put it into execution. 

And that was ** a mere question of time/* as 
Marston said to every man, woman and child 
that spoke to him on the subject. 



CHAPTER X. 

AN ENEMY ! 

It is almost needless to state that the American 
public took a most absorbing interest in every 
detail of the great enterprise. The reports of 
the Committee occupied the best columns of the 
newspapers and furnished reading matter that 
grew more and more exciting every day. The 
enormous figures, at first only faintly compre- 
hended, were read over and over again with 
renewed wonder, and as the tremendous nature 
of the difficulties to be overcome slowly dawned 
on the public mind, the general curiosity to 
learn more about them became every day more 
and more intense. Like the silkworm, the more 
it fed the hungrier it grew. Never even had the 
war in its palmiest days given the public inquisi- 
tiveness so keen a whet. Even in out of the way 
places, like Dubuque, many an ancient maiden 
lady protested that the proceedings of the Balti- 
more Gun Club were ten times more fascinating 
than even her favorite New York Ledger, 

And more than a year was to elapse between 

("7) 



118 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

the commencement of the undertaking and its 
final accomplishment. How delightful ! A stock 
of excitement that was sure to hold out for at 
least three hundred and sixty-five days longer ! 
Every morning a new instalment ! The choice of 
a place for the scene of operations ; the construc- 
tion of the immense mould ; the casting of the 
gigantic Columbiad ; the lodgment of the ter- 
rific charge ; and then the grand, high-wrought, 
overwhelming catastrophe ! At this, of course, 
the interest would reach its culminating point for 
the public at large. What would become of 
the projectile after its disappearance, how it 
would comport itself in space, how it would 
reach tiie moon, should evidently be taken on 
hearsay, and that, from the nature of the case, 
would be anything but reliable. Accordingly, 
the chief interest settled upon the preparations 
for the vast enterprise, and the slightest detail 
copied from paper to paper, was everywhere wel- 
come, and everywhere commented upon with the 
keenest gusto. 

Great as was the public excitement, it was 
soon raised to an even higher pitch by an in- 
cident worthy of being related in full. 

We know already what numberless legions of 
admiring friends Barbican's daring genius had 



AN ENEMY ! 119 

rallied around him. But the public idolatry 
of which he was the object, was not exactly 
unanimous. One man, the only man through- 
out the length and breadth of the great United 
States, was found bold enough to protest against 
the project of the Gun Club. He attacked it 
with might and main, and on every possible 
occasion ; and, as is usual with poor human 
nature. Barbican was more sensitive to the op- 
position of a single man than to the applause 
of all the others. 

Not that he was not well aware of the motive 
of this antipathy, of the source of this isolated 
enmity; he fully understood why this opposition 
was of a purely personal nature of ancient date, 
and how jealousy and rivalry had given it birth. 

This bitter enemy, Barbican had never yet 
laid eyes on— a fortunate circumstance for both, 
as bloodshed would have been the probable 
consequence. Like Barbican, he was a practical 
scientist, and, like many other scientific men, 
of a hot temper, a domineering disposition, and 
implacable in his resentment. He was a Phila- 
delphian by birth, and, like many of his towns- 
men, was descended from that tough-jointed, 
clear-headed, stubborn-hearted, close-fisted race 
that had emigrated from the north of Ireland, and 



120 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

settled in Pennsylvania in such numbers, eighty 
or ninety years ago. Having spent the early 
years of his youth on board a Mississippi steamer, 
in the capacity of captain's clerk, he was famil- 
iarly known all over Philadelphia as Captain 
McNicholl, though he was now one of the great- 
est iron men in the country. 

Everybody has heard of the curious contest 
that existed during the Confederate War between 
the cannon and the iron clads — the one bent 
on being irresistible, the other on being impene- 
trable. The consequence was a radical change 
in the navy of both continents. The projectile 
and the iron plate fought each other with unex- 
ampled persistency, the one increasing in thick- 
ness as fast as the other increased in weight. 
Vessels armed with tremendous guns, and shel- 
tered by their invulnerable coat of mail, went 
unharmed under the hottest fire. The Merrtmacs, 
the Monitors^ the Mia7ito7iomahs , the Weehaw- 
kens, the Dictators, the Dunderbergs, were thus 
enabled to discharge their enormous projectiles 
almost with perfect impunity. They did unto 
others what they would not allow others to do 
unto them — a highly immoral principle, though 
the whole art of '' glorious" war is based on it. 

Now if Barbican was a great founder of can- 



AN ENEMY! 121 

non, McNicholl was a great forger of iron plates. 
The one worked night and day in his great 
foundry on the Bel Air Road, Baltimore, the 
other worked day and night in his great machine 
shop, Broad street, Philadelphia. Each ran di- 
rectly counter to the other in the course of 
his ideas. The m.oment Barbican invented a 
new projectile, McNicholl invented a new shield. 
The Baltimorian passed his life in attacking, 
the Philadelphian in repelling. Hence a bitter 
antagonism between the two, the consciousness 
of which neither could shake off. In his dreams 
Barbican saw McNicholl in the shape of an 
adamantine target against which he was driven 
headlong, to be flattened like a leaden bullet ; 
McNicholl saw Barbican in his dreams, in the 
shape of a hissing steel-pointed projectile, hurled 
against him with resistless force and sure to 
sweep him off the face of the earth. 

Though they certainly never tried to avoid 
each other, fate had so ordained it that, as said 
before, as yet they had never met face to face. 
When Barbican was seeing to the cannons of the 
Army of the Foto77iac^ McNicholl was attending to 
the gunboats of the Army of the Mississippi; 
when McNicholl was Grant's right hand man 
before Richmond, Barbican was marching to the 



122 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

sea with Sherman. Of course their friends who 
knew the injury the country would sustain in 
the loss of such valuable citizens, threw every 
obstacle in the way of a personal rencounter. 

It was hard to say which of these inventors 
got the better of the other; the results left the 
matter undetermined. The probability was that 
the plate should succumb to the bullet, though 
expert judges still had their doubts. At one of 
the later experiments, Barbican's cylindro-conical 
projectiles made McNichoirs rolled iron plates 
look like a pin cushion, but did no further harm. 
On that day the great Philadelphia iron worker, 
considering his victory secure, spoke of his rival 
in terms of lofty contempt j but the tables were 
turned with a vengeance when Barbican dropped 
the conical bullets and took six hundred pound 
steel shells in their place. Though endowed 
with but a moderate velocity, they pierced, 
smashed, and broke to pieces armor construc- 
ted of the very best material. 

To this point matters had come : the victory 
seemed to rest with the bullet, when Lee sur- 
rendered on the very day that McNichoU had 
completed his patent target of forged steel ! It 
was a masterpiece of its kind, and defied all 
the projectiles ever devised. The Captain had 



AN ENEMY I 123 

it immediately conveyed to AVashington, set it 
up on the heights of the Potomac near the Long 
Bridge, and immediately sent Barbican a chal- 
lenge to come and pound at it as long as he 
pleased, and with whatever bullets he pleased, 
solid, hollow, round or pointed. Peace being 
made. Barbican, unwilling to compromise his 
last success, respectfully declined., ]\IcXicholl, 
exasperated at the refusal, tried to tempt him by 
giving him his choice of distance. Two hun- 
dred yards ? One hundred yards ? No, not 
even at seventy-five. 

'' Take fifty yards then !" wrote INIcXicholI 
in the Washingto7i Star, ^' or even forty yards 
from my target, and I shall stand behind it 
myself!'* But Barbican replied in the JVash- 
ingion Unio7i that he would not fire if IMcXicholl 
should stand even before it. 

At this, ]\IcXichoirs rage exceeded all bounds. 
He wrote a long letter in the New York Herald 
full of personalities. He insinuated that a 
coward in one way is a coward in every way ; 
that a man refusing to fire a cannon can hardly 
be called brave ; that those artillerymen who 
fight each other six miles apart, try to substi- 
tute mathematical formulas for personal bravery; 
and that at least as much courage is shown by 



124 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

waiting quietly for a bullet behind a target as 
by discharging it according to all the rules of 
art. 

To such innuendoes Barbican did not vouch- 
safe the least reply — the probability is that he 
knew nothing about them, immersed, as he now 
was, over head and ears in his new project. 

When he heard of the famous communication 
to the Gun Club, the Captain went almost crazy. 
The cruel stab of envy was rendered more poig- 
nant by the consciousness of his utter inability 
to mend matters. How could he think of in- 
venting anything to surpass a Columbiad nine 
hundred feet long ? What armor could resist a 
bullet weighing 20,000 pounds ? The shot pretty 
nigh killed him ; but he was one of the '* die 
hards;'* after the first stunning effect was over, 
he gradually recovered from the blow ; then he 
picked himself up and registered a great oath that 
he would smash Barbican 's project or perish in 
the attempt. 

He let fly tremendous broadsides at the whole 
idea in a series of letters, which the papers posi- 
tively refused to publish, until they found that 
nobody minded them. He undertook to de- 
monstrate its utter absurdity at first from a 
scientific point of view, but, war once declared. 



AN ENEMY I 125 

he drew his arguments from every quarter, 
and, sooth to say, some of them were poor 
enough. 

He began by attacking the calculations. The 
Captain covered the paper with x^s and fs^ 
proving Barbican' s utter ignorance of the first 
principles of Ballistics. For instance, it was a 
physical impossibility to impart to any projec- 
tile an initial velocity of 12,000 yards, and even 
if it were imparted, he demonstrated by an al- 
gebraic formula within a schoolboy's comprehen- 
sion, that no bullet of such a weight could ever 
get beyond the limits of the terrestrial atmosphere. 
It would not go even half the way ! And 
worse than that was to come. Even supposing 
that the said velocity was imparted, and that 
the said velocity was sufficient for the purpose, 
why, the shell could never resist the terrific 
pressure caused by the combustion of 1600 thou- 
sand pounds of powder ; and even supposing it 
did resist this pressure, it could never bear the 
enormous heat sure to be developed, and there- 
fore it would melt like wax the moment it left 
the Columbiad, and fall in showers of burning 
rain on the heads of the spectators that were 
foolish enough to expose themselves to such 
evident danger ! 



126 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

But not even a frown from Barbican, who 
calmly continued at his labors. 

Then McNicholl took up the question in its 
other aspects. Not to speak of the utterly un- 
mitigated inutility of the project viewed from 
every possible point, he considered the experi- 
ment to be one of a highly dangerous nature, 
both for the lookers on who would be silly 
enough to encourage such proceedings by their 
presence, and for all the cities comprised within 
a radius of a hundred miles from this obnoxious 
cannon. He went on to prove that if the pro- 
jectile did not attain its object — an irredeemable 
impossibility — it should evidently fall back on 
the earth, and then what terrible consequences 
would be the result ! 

Multiplying the weight of the enormous mass 
by the square of the distance through which it 
should fall, he produced an array of figures it 
would give you a headache to look at. The 
least possible harm it could do was to make a 
hole in the earth big enough to swallow up a 
city fully as large as Baltimore. Absit Omen I 
As for his own personal safety, he, McNicholl, 
was not in the least concerned. He could and 
would take care of himself. But as a citizen 
concerned in the welfare of his country, he 



Xn enemy I ±21 

lifted up his voice against the whole nefarious pro- 
ceeding. It was a clear case for government 
interference ; in no other country on earth would 
such a thing be allowed ; but when would the 
United States learn that the safety of all should 
never be hazarded for the sake of humoring 
the folly, or gratifying the selfishness, of some 
insignificant individual ? 

Evidently the Captain ran riot in his spirit 
of exaggeration. But, one comfort, nobody 
shared his opinions. Nobody ever read his 
letters, except the proof-corrector and he had 
forgotten all about them in five minutes. They 
did not shake the faith of a single one among 
Barbican' s millions of worshippers. The Presi- 
dent of the Gun Club never deigned to reply 
even by a gesture, but sat aloft enshrined in the 
majesty of his calculations, to all appearance as 
serene, calm and composed as the great Olympian 
Jove himself. Nevertheless the mighty thunderer's 
ambrosial locks were to be shaken at last. 

Ihe greatest sporting paper of. the United States 
is the well known New York Living Age, It 
is the recognized organ for theatres, billiards, 
base ball matches, horse races, boat races, prize 
fights and gambling of all kinds, except the 
little gambling now and then done in stocks. 



128 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

Its Circulation is therefore immense, though its 
literary matter — apart from its authoritative deci- 
sion of bets — does not attract much attention. 
In its issue of October 17th, the following chal- 
lenge appeared in its editorial columns, printed 
in double leaded type : 



" Philadelphia, October 16, 186-. 

" To the Editor of the New York Living Age. 

" My Dear Sir : — To convince you and every right 
thinking man. that I am quite in earnest when I de- 
nounce the Baltimore gun project as a * phantom, a 
delusion and a snare, ' the shallowest humbug of the 
easily gulled nineteenth century, I take advantage 
of your widely circulated and influential journal to 
make the following propositions : 

" I . I assert that the funds necessary for the enterprise 
ivill ne'ver he raised^ and I back my assertion with the 
sum of, $1,000 00 

" 2. I assert that the casting of a cannon nine hundred 
feet long is impossible^ and this I back with the sum 
of, $2,000 00 

" 3. I assert that it is impossible to load the Columbiad, 
as the gun cotton ijjould take fire under the pressure of 
the bullet, and this I back with the sum of, $3,000 00 

" 4. I assert that the Columhiad ^ivill burst at the first 
offer and this I back with the sum of, . , $4,000 00 

" 5. I assert that the projectile avill not rise e^en 6 miles 



AN EXE MY t 129 

and that it ^11 fall back in a fenv moments afteri^vards • 
this assertion I back to the sum of, , . . 85,000 co 

** These bets, Mr. Editor, are open, separately or 
collectively, for the acceptance of any man whomsoever, 
only wilh this well understood preliminary condition, 
that the moment they are taken the corresponding 
amount of money will be put up immediately, and at 
once deposited in the JVall Street Bank, subject to your 
check alone. 

" This bona fide offer of mine must of course meet 
your approval. If I am not very much mistaken, it 
will at last succeed in tearing the mask off those shame- 
less hypocrites who, with no risk to themselves, have 
so far found it an easy task to abuse the credulity of 
their simple countrymen. 

*' Your obedient servant, 

"JOSHL^A D. McNiCHOLL.*' 

The Ne^v York morning papers cannot reach 
Baltimore much sooner than three o'clock in 
the afternoon, the hour at which the Captain, 
punctual as clock-work, sat down to dinner every 

day. Nevertheless, he had not quite got through 
his soup when an envelope was handed to him, 
containing the following laconic telegram : 

** Baltimore, October 17, 
" Taken ! 

"J. P. Barbican." 



130 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

The same evening the editor of the Neiv York 
Living Age received a note from the Cashier of 
the Wall Street Bank, stating that $15,000 had 
just been deposited there to be held subject to 
his order. 



CHAPTER XI. 

FLORIDA OR TEXAS ? 

An important question was still left unde- 
cided : that of choosing the ground where the 
great experiment was to be made. According 
to the directions received from Cambridge, the 
cannon was to be pointed in a line perpen- 
dicular to the plane of the horizon, that is, 
exactly in the direction of the zenith ; now as 
the ]\Ioon is never in the zenith, or directly 
overhead, in countries further than 28° from the 
equator, to decide on the exact spot for casting 
the Columbiad becam.e a question that required 
some nice consultation. 

At a general meeting of the Club held on 
the evening of October 9th, Barbican, having 
called the assembly to order, began unrolling 
one of jNIitcheirs beautiful maps of the United 
States, when Marston, who could never keep still 
five minutes, suddenly jumped up with the in- 
tention of offering a ^' few preliminary remarks.** 

*'Mr. President and gentlemen,'* he ex- 
claimed, '* the question we are to treat of this 

(131) 



132 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

evening is one likely to assume a national im- 
portance, and it is therefore bound to test every 
particle of patriotism that we can boast of/' 

He was altogether out of order, but every- 
body knew the eccentric Marston and his '* great 
gift of gab/' as his acquaintances termed it, an 
expression softened off by his friends into *^ fatal 
facility." Besides they all wanted to know what 
in the world he was coming to. 

^^ High above, far high above all earthly con- 
siderations," the orator went on, ^' we set the 
glory of our" noble country, and if anything can 
redound to her glory in a very remarkable de- 
gree, it is to contain within her territories the 
historic spot that is evermore to be inseparably 
associated with the grandest idea that ever flashed 
from human soul ! Yes, gentlemen, down through 
the shadowy vistas of future years, as through 
a vast cathedral's myriad aisles — down through 
the long echoing corridors of all time, I see a 
name — ' ' 

** Order ! order !" here broke in some voices. 

'^ Question ! Question !" shouted others. 

^^ Mr. Secretary " observed Barbican. 

^* Allow me to conclude !" cried Marston ex- 
citedly, in a voice easily heard above the rest. 
^^ I mean to say that as this spot is to be 



FLORIDA OR TEXAS? 133 

sought for in a country nearer to the equator 
than our own '* 

<* Question ! Question !" again shouted many 
voices in different parts of the hall. 

*< Come, Marston, dry up !" cried some of his 
friends, who knew that geography was not the 
Secretary's strong point* 

*^ AVade in, old man !'* cried some of the 
younger members, highly amused, and too fond 
of fun to mind their manners. *' Go for 'em ! 
Sail in, lemons !" 

^* Really, Mr. Secretary, I regret exceedingly," 
cried the President, ready to tap the detonating 
bell, '^but " 

*^ Really, Mr. President, I also regret it ex- 
ceedingly," interrupted Marston, not a particle 
cowed by the disorder he had excited, ^^ but 1 
will not be bottled up before I finish, and there 
is no use whatever in trying to choke me off. 
All I mean to say is this : Since our experiment 
must be made on our own soil, and since our 
own soil does not extend to. the 28th parallel, 
I propose that we advance our boundaries as far 
as the 28th parallel, even if we have to fight 
Mexico for it !" 

The roars of laughter that greeted these words 
were so loud, hearty, and universal that Mars- 



134 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

ton, at once concluding he had '^ put his foot 
in it/' took his seat, somewhat mortified and 
even disconcerted. Barbican flew to the relief 
of his friend, by touching off the fulminating 
bell, and in an instant everything became as 
still as death. 

^^ Gentlemen,'* said the President, calmly, .^^ our 
honored Secretary knows so many things that 
he may be well excused if he happens to forget 
one or two. (Hear !) And if anything is ex- 
cusable it is some slip of memory regarding the 
wonderful progress of our glorious country. 
Let only the innocent one throw the first 
stone. Which of us can tell off hand the exact 
number of States at present constituting our 
Union ? (Hear ! Hear ! and renewed applause.) 
Besides geography is rather a ticklish subject. 
The greatest minds have sometimes been known 
to succumb to its intricacies. Did not a British 
lord of the Admiralty speak of Pittsburgh as a 
seaport town ? (General hilarity.) Have we not 
all heard of the eminent English historian who 
spent several hours looking for Bunker Hill 
among the Allegheny Mountains ? (Roars of 
laughter.) If my accomplished but somewhat 
impetuous friend had only given me time to 
open my map, as I do now, he would have 



FLORIDA OR TEXAS f 135 

seen with his own eyes that there is no need 
whatever of a fight with Mexico. A glance at 
Florida and Texas shows that our boundaries 
not only include the 28th parallel of latitude, 
but approach very nearly to the 25th/^ 

In spite, however, of the President's well meant 
efforts to soften off Marston's blunder, it had 
excited the hilarity of the Gun Club too much 
to render any serious work possible that eve- 
ning The meeting, after a few ineffectual at- 
tempts at serious business, broke up in some dis- 
order, without deciding whether the cannon was 
to be cast in Florida or Texas. The unfortu- 
nate consequence of it all was that an exceed- 
ingly warm contest immediately sprung up on 
the subject between these two rival States. 

The 28th parallel of north latitude, as every 
school boy knows, strikes the American continent 
a little below Cape Cannaveral, crosses the pen- 
insula of Florida, and divides it into two 
parts pretty nearly equal. Then passing through 
the Gulf of Mexico about one degree south of 
the mouth of the Mississippi, it enters Texas at 
x\ransas Bay, crosses over the Rio Grande into 
Mexico, meets the Gulf of California at Guay- 
mas, and is soon lost in the waters of the 
Pacific Ocean. It was therefore only in those 



136 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

portions of Florida and Texas that lay south of 
this parallel, that the conditions regarding lati- 
tude recommended by the Cambridge Observa- 
tory, could be complied with. 

The southern part of Florida, the amphibious 
country of hummock land, savannahs, swamps, 
lakes, and the immense stretch of marsh called 
the Everglades, contains hardly a town deserv- 
ing notice. The settlements, ^^ few and far 
between,*' generally consist of some huts in the 
neighborhood of the numerous forts erected 
about thirty- years ago, the time of the Osceola 
war. The few Seminoles now left, live quietly 
enough under their old Chief, Tiger Tail, 
though, if so disposed, they could still give the 
whites considerable trouble, as the nature of the 
country affords them complete protection against 
every possible civilized appliance of war, except 
the bloodhound. Key West, a flourishing town 
on a little island in the extreme south, had the 
disadvantages of being both too distant and ac- 
cessible only by water. Tampa, a small village 
at the head of Tampa Bay, seemed to be the 
only place which united the conditions of posi- 
tion and easiness of approach, both by sea and land. 

Texas, on the contrary, even in the compara- 
tively small angle of territory lying south of 



FLORIDA OR TEXAS? 137 

parallel 28, contained several important and 
thriving towns. San Patricio on the Nueces, 
Corpus Christ! on a bay of the same name, 
Brownsville on the Rio Grande, Rio Grande 
City further up, Laredo higher still, at the point 
where the San Antonio and the Saltillo road 
crossed the river — these towns alone, not to 
mention several others, formed a very imposing 
obstacle to the claims made by Florida. 

As was to be expected, the moment it was 
known that the Gun Club had not quite made 
up its mind, but hung fire between the merits 
of Florida and Texas, deputies from the rival 
States, commissioned to urge their claims by 
every means in their power, began to arrive in 
great numbers in Baltimore. The Club House 
was soon besieged night and day, and neither 
Barbican nor any other influential member could 
appear in the public streets without running an 
imminent risk of being talked to death. Angry 
collisions between the hostile claimants became 
of frequent occurrence. Seven, cities of Greece 
fought of old for the honor of Homer's birth ; 
here were two great States ready to fly at each 
other's throat for the sake of a cannon ; such 
is the nature of man ; if he has not one thing 
to fight about he soon finds another. 



138 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

Happily in the present case the well organ- 
ized police force of Baltimore, under the effi- 
cient direction of Marshal O'Kane, prevented 
the hot Floridians and Texans from having rifle 
duels in the streets, or ripping each other up 
with bowie knives. By way of safety-valve, 
however, they let off their angry passions in the 
columns of the daily papers. The Baltimore press 
having no circulation in Florida or Texas, the 
war was carried on by the great New York 
journals, which find their way to all parts of 
the Union — I was going to say of the world. 
The He7'ald and the Tribicne^ agreeing for once 
in their lives, sustained the claims of Texas ; 
the World and the Times, a union unprece- 
dented in the annals of journalism, fought side 
by side, their bitter old feuds suppressed or 
forgotten for the moment, in their keen desire 
to uphold the cause of Florida. 

Texas advanced to the attack, boldly priding 
herself on her immense size, six times larger 
than the State of Pennsylvania, and her 162 
counties. Florida replied that her 37 counties 
were more creditable in a State six times smaller. 
When Texas pointed to her population of 
800,000 souls, Florida met her with a figure 
of 200,000, which was a higher proportion, 



FLORIDA OR TEXAS? 139 

considering the respective size of the States. 
Besides, she accused her rival of her unhealthy 
soil, which, giving rise to chills and fevers, 
consumption and pneumonia, carried off her in- 
habitants by the thousands. Texas replied that 
as far as regards chills and fevers, the less 
Florida had to say the better, her climate in the 
southern part of the peninsula being so deadly 
that no white man could live there ; adding, 
that when the last Seminole died, the Everglades 
forever after would become the abode of no- 
thing but alligators, bears and monstrous serpents. 

Apparently by mutual consent, both States 
soon changed this subject of the question, and 
went on to another tack. 

** Is no account to be made of a State,*' 
indignantly cried the New Yo?^k Herald, '^ that 
actually ranks fourth in the production of cotton, 
whose forests of magnificent live oak stand un- 
rivalled on the continent, whose silver mines of 
San Saba, worked in the old Spanish times, 
are among the richest in the world, whose coal 
beds on the Trinity, on the Brazos, on the 
Rio Grande, are at least equal to those of 
Pennsylvania, and whose supply of iron ore in 
almost every quarter of the State is simply in- 
exhaustible ?" 



140 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

*^ Why/' sneered the World in reply, *^ why 
did not Texas brag, since the fit was on her, 
of her ^ Llano Estacado,' and her other grass- 
less deserts in w^hich she likewise ^ stood un- 
rivalled * ? Wliy not plume herself on her terrific 
' Northers,' the scourge of the Gulf of ]\Iexico, 
in her winter supply of which she is ' simply 
inexhaustible ' ? But all this had nothing at all 
to do with the question, which, cleared of all 
turgid bombast, stood as follows : Which State 
offered the most favorable conditions for the 
moulding and casting of the great Columbiad ? 
Clearly Florida, her soil being generally sandy or 
argillaceous, and therefore easily excavated." 

^' Granted for argument's sake," spoke the 
placid Tribune, ^' But surely before casting a 
cannon anywhere, you must first succeed in 
getting there. Now, as the Gulf Railroad 
is not finished yet, nor likely to be for some 
years, how is central Florida to be approached ? 
The Spaniards, the great road builders, had 
never built roads in Florida, as the settlers 
would never venture into the interior. But 
look at Texas ! Besides Corpus Christ! Bay and 
Laguna del Madre, was there not the Rio Grande, 
navigable 450 miles from the sea, and affording 
perfect communications with the interior by the 



FLORIDA OR TEXAS? 141 

Presidio road, the Laredo road, and the Ca- 
margo road, that had been found so useful in 
the Mexican war ? Not to mention Galveston 
Bay, one of the finest harbors in the world, 
and in regular communication with New Orleans 
by the Morgan steamers/' 

" Ha ! Ha ! I like that !'' laughed the pert 
Tt7nes, ^' the old lady of the Tribu?ie has for- 
gotten her geography. Galveston ! Why, it is 
more than 29 degrees north ! She might as well 
tell us that Texas could be entered by a sail 
up the Red River to Shreveport. Corpus Christi 
Bay, and Laguna del Madre ! What were they ? 
Quicksands covered with water at high tides ! 
The Rio Grande navigable for 450 miles ! What 
did the old lady mean ? Navigable ! Yes, per- 
haps for mudscows. But surely, the old dame 
with her usual ponderous awkward wit could 
hardly mean to imply that the members of the 
honorable Baltimore Gun Club were no better 
than mudsills I But suppose they had paddled 
themselves up the Rio Grande for some distance, 
to what place would these roads, paraded with 
such display, take them ? To the most misera- 
ble corner in Texas, unproductive prairie land, 
mere thickets of chaparal, 'with gigantic cactuses 
here, sharp pointed Yuccas there, cat-claw briars 



442 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

everywhere, and a good drop of water no- 
where !* 

'^ Now let the old lady put on her spectacles 
and look at the map of Florida, crossed by the 
28th parallel itself. On the western coast could 
be seen the beautiful Bay of Tampa, 40 miles 
long, and navigable for the largest vessels. If 
the Tribune had no atlas of her own, the 
Times would send her one with the greatest 
pleasure ; the Times being particularly fond of 
geography, and desirous to encourage people in 
such a highly interesting study.*' 

*^ The Times is undoubtedly the highest au- 
thority in the country on geography !" roared 
the Herald, ^' its masterly monogram on the 
^Elbows of the Mincio,' put that point beyond 
dispute long ago.*' (This was giving a rap on 
the knuckles to the Times for an egregious 
blunder in geography, which it had once made 
in describing some military operations in the 
Italian war, and which it had innocently believed 
to be long since completely forgotten. But the 
Herald never forgot anything, and, as usual, he 
now sought to cover his retreat from weak 
ground by trying to turn the laugh on his op- 
ponent.) ^^ Was it not a well known fact," 
he demanded, '* that the Ti77ies* profound ob- 



FLORIDA OR TEXAS? 143 

servations on the * Quadrilateral/ compelled 
Humboldt to suspend for a time his work on 
the Cosmos^ and even to re-write his three best 
chapters ? Did not Guyot regard the Tunes with 
such veneration as never to venture on the 
slightest geographical generalization without its 
previous endorsement ? When such luminaries 
bowed in submission to the geographical oracle, 
what could humble journalists do but gracefully 
imitate their example ? The Herald, therefore, 
would not waste printer's ink by repeating that 
the whole State of Florida, almost from end to 
end, was primeval forest, alternating with pine 
barrens, wilderness and unreclaimed swamp-land, 
hideous with alligators, howling with panthers, 
and sprinkled with a miserable human population, 
one half negro, the other half partly Indian, 
partly Spanish, partly ' poor white trash.' Dr. 
Livingstone, suddenly dropped into it, would 
still think himself in the worst parts of Africa. 
From its history Florida could hardly be other- 
wise. The Times'^ cranium, too swollen with 
geography to have room for history, had to be 
reminded that Florida, discovered by Ponce de 
Leon in 1512, had remained in possession of 
the sleepy Spaniards for 300 years, with the ex- 
ception of the short time that the English were 



144 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

in possession. What could be expected from a 
country held by do-nothing Dons and blood- 
sucking mercenary English ? Did not both 
parties, jealous of the neighboring United States, 
instigate the Indian marauders to commence 
depredations against the Georgia settlements, 
until General Jackson made peace by invading 
the country, taking some forts, and hanging 
some Englishmen ? Was not Spain glad to settle 
the matter by selling the peninsula for 5 mil- 
lions of dollars ? But though this happened in 
182 1, was not the real trouble of the United 
States government then only at its commence- 
ment ? Who could describe the horrors of the 
Seminole war ? or enumerate the millions of 
dollars expended, and the thousands of valuable 
lives sacrificed? Not until 1845, 24 years after 
her purchase, was Florida admitted into the 
Union, the costliest State that ever became a 
member of our glorious confederation. These 
things considered, and remembering that her 
population was even yet half negro, y^ Indian, 
y^ Spanish, and the other ^ ^^ Crackers," was 
not it rather cheeky in Florida to call herself 
American at all ?" 

'^ Cheeky !" repeated the World, shocked at 
the term. *' But according to the eternal fit- 



FLORIDA OR TEXAS? 145 

ness of things, were not the HeralcTs columns 
just the place to expect such slang ? Poor Texas 
might well exclaim ^ Save me from my friends !* 
Had she never heard of the proverb about 
glasshouses ? Why call up memories that had 
better be buried in eternal oblivion ? Before 
sneering at the population of Florida, should she 
not have remembered that she was first peopled 
herself by runaway slaves? Were Georgia ^'Crack- 
ers'' worse than the despised '^ Greasers ?'* Was 
not a Spaniard at least as good as a Mexican ? 
As for the Indians, the brave Seminoles cer- 
tainly ranked as high in the scale of humanity 
as the plundering Kiowas, the murdering Apaches, 
or the treacherous Comanches. American 1 What 
was American if Florida was not ? What city of 
the United States had a better right to the name 
than Saint Augustine, the oldest town in the 
Union ? Her streets were lively and flourishing 
300 years ago, that is, many years before the 
Cavaliers saw the James ; the Puritans, Plymouth 
Rock ; the Dutch, the Hudson ; the Swedes, the 
Brandywine ; or the French, the Mississippi. It 
was an old city ere the Catholics saw the Po- 
tomac ; the Huguenots, the Ashley, or the 
Quakers, the Delaware. In other words, for pri- 
ority of claim to the name Americariy Florida 
10 



146 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

could enter the list with even any of the old 
glorious Thirteen !*' 

^' Facts before fancy !'* hotly objected the 
Tribune. ^' Dates proved nothing. Florida may 
have been settled 300 years ago, but what had she 
ever done for the country ? What had she ever 
done for herself? The man that spoke of Florida 
and the glorious Thirteen in the same breath, 
was a premium idiot ! Now if any State could 
claim the glory of being inscribed among those 
deathless names, it was Texas, and Texas alone ! 
The Thirteen had fought and bled, and at last 
achieved independence under General George 
Washington, who by the great victory of York- 
town, October 19th, 1781, expelled the foe forever 
from our soil. Texas, single-handed, had fought 
and bled, and at last achieved independence 
under General Sam Houston, who by his great 
victory of San Jacinto, March 2d, 1836, delivered 
the country forever from the Mexican invader. 
What other State could say as much ? To 
conclude, did not the State of the Lone 
Star, full of admiration for our institutions, 
and desirous to participate in their advan- 
tages, voluntarily relinquish her independence, 
and, unbribed and uncorrupted, annex herself 
to our glorious Union in 1845 ^ Could any 



FLORIDA OR TEXAS? 147 

State show a cleaner, sounder, or more credita- 
ble record ?'* 

^' Achieved her independence /'' yelled the 
Times. ^^ That was ^ cheek/ to borrow the phrase 
of a cotemporary, more remarkable for force 
than elegance ! A crowd of Northern rowdies 
and Southern slave-drivers, calling themselves 
Texans, happened one day to frighten the wits 
out of a miserable set of Mexican Greasers, led 
by Santa Anna, one of the half dozen Presi- 
dents at that time pretending to rule the 
wretched Republic ! Would not Sam Houston 
and his whole band of hungry adventurers have 
been easily gobbled up, as Walker was after- 
wards, by the Mexicans, the very first moment 
they had freed themselves from the French 
complications, and their owq intestine squabbles ? 
Voluntarily annexed herself to our Union I There 
was richness ! We should soon have men chal- 
lenging our gratitude, because they showed sense 
enough to run under an arch when they saw a 
storm coming. Why not call on us to admire 
the English fugitive from justice for his mag- 
nanimity in landing at New York ?*' 

And so the war ran on for many a day, but 
we must spare our readers the rest. In fact, 
in order not to weary their patience too much, 



448 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

we have given only a very feeble and meagre 
summary of what appeared every day in these 
great organs of public opinion. Every morning 
they let fly at each other an editorial, at least 
three columns long, written in a style worthy 
of Macaulay, not to mention the squibs, jokes, 
puns and conundrums that flashed all over the 
paper. For several weeks the sub-editors had 
a very hard time of it indeed, working night 
and day, one set in the Cooper Institute, another 
in the Astor Library, ransacking the shelves in 
diligent search of such facts in American history 
as were most easily manipulated into telling 
points. 

Of course this war of the newspapers did no 
good whatever towards settling the main question. 
Not that what they stated was not true or not to 
the purpose, or not even highly instructive to 
those million readers who rely on their paper foF 
history as well as for news, poetry, and general 
information. Not that every member of the 
Gun Club did not religiously wade through his 
half-dozen papers every morning at breakfast 
time. The trouble was that the more they read 
the more they were puzzled, and the more un- 
decided they became. The advantages and dis- 
advantages presented by both States were balanced 



FLORIDA OR TEXAS f 149 

to a hair, and the Gun Club was too strictly 
philosophical, too severely logical to come to 

any decision whatever, without being compelled 
to it by a cogent preponderance of argument. 
Recent political events, of course, counted neither 
way. The club, ^' Union men" to the core, 
were too generous, too high toned to make the 
slightest allusion to the part taken by either 
Florida or Texas during the great civil war. 

The case was fast becoming another instance 
of the ass starving between the two bundles of 
hay, because he could not make up his mind 
which one he should begin at ; overvitality, in 
fact, was threatening the enterprise with sudden 
dissolution, when all at once, a luminous idea 
struck Barbican. He instantly called the Club 
together and spoke as follows : 

^* Gentlemen, you are aware of what a diffi- 
cult matter it is to decide between the conflict- 
ing claims of Florida and Texas. Has it ever 
occurred to you that when we have settled on 
the State^ the difficulty will still be far from 
ended ? The respective merits of the ion'ns in 
the favored State will then have to be discussed, 
and who can tell when we should come to an 
end ? Now Texas possesses at least six towns 
ready to fly at each other's throats for the honor 



150 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

of being the scene of our great enterprise, and 
therefore certain to cause us more delay and more 
vexation. Whereas Florida has but one. You 
see the idea ? It solves all difficulties at once if 
we decide on Florida for the State, and Tampa 
for the town !" 

It is needless to say that this proposition was 
instantly and unanimously carried. The pre- 
ponderance of argument in its favor was too over- 
whelming to be resisted. But the decision when 
reported in the evening papers, struck the un- 
fortunate Texan commissioners actually speechless. 
In their paroxysms of rage they challenged every 
member of the Club to a duel, to be fought 
next morning with rifles at 20 paces distant. 
The police authorities had but one course to 
take, and they took it. They made a coup d' 
etat that very night on the Texans in their hotel, 
the Euiaiv House, They captured every man 
of them, put them into a special train well pro 
vided with food and drink for a week, and 
started them at once out of the city at the rate 
of thirty miles an hour. 

The commissioners, as they recovered from 
the stunning effects of the surprise, by degrees 
came to a true sense of the situation. Feeling 
that violence would not mend matters, they spent 



FLORIDA OR TEXAS f 151 

the rest of their journey in concocting some plan 
to console their people at home for their failure. 
Putting on faces expressive of the greatest joy, 
they warmly congratulated the disappointed Texans 
on their extraordinary good fortune in having 
escaped the presence of the '^ consarned thing/* 
which would be sure to ^^ bust" at the first 
chance and blow up little '^ Florry/* Crackers, 
Spaniards, Niggers, alligators and all, into ^' one 
grand, almighty, and everlasting smash !" 

This evil omen had no effect on the jubilant 
Floridians. '' Let her rip ! Who's afeard ?'* 
they unanimously exclaimed, with a spirit worthy 
of Curtius when he jumped into the yawning 
chasm. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE FINANCIAL QUESTION. 

The astronomical, mechanical and topographi- 
cal difficulties of the enterprise once squarely 
met and satisfactorily settled, next came the 
financial question. Without the dollars, '^ the 
sinews of war,'* nothing could be done. The 
immense sum required would evidently reach 
too high a figure for any private individual, any 
club, any State, or even any government. 

But though the enterprise was of American 
origin, Barbican had determined to enlist the 
sympathies of the whole world in its success, and 
to demand the financial co-operation of every 
civilized people. It was clearly the right as 
well as the duty of every nation of the earth 
to be interested in the matter so closely con- 
cerning our common satellite. The subscription 
therefore opened at Baltimore was not to be 
confined to that city alone ; it was to extend 
from that city to the world at large — like the 
Pope's blessing at St. Peter's on Easter Sunday 
—'' Urbi et Orbi.'' 
(15^) 



THE FINANCIAL QUESTION 153 

This subscription was to be no stockbroker 
operation or government loan ; it was not 
started for the redemption of territory ; it did not 
propose building a railroad to Hudson's Bay, cer- 
tain to pay every shareholder 150 per cent, on his 
investment ; it did not propose to pay any in- 
terest at all; it did not even propose to return 
one cent of the principal ; not a single human be- 
ing was ever to make a penny by it ; yet it was 
destined ^ to have a success unparalleled in the 
annals of subscription. Why so ? Because in the 
United States, as in the world at large, the 
nature of man has been so improved by the 
teachings of this 19th century, so elevated above 
mere consideration of self, that hard, vulgar 
utility has become unprized — an obsolete bar- 
barism. Consequently, the moment an enterprise 
is announced which touches our fancy, appeals 
to our ideality, or plays upon our abstract love 
of the sublime, our purse strings fly open as 
with a spring, and the fortunate originator of 
the envied idea is soon almost smothered be- 
neath the piles of our contributions. It was 
thus with the proposition of the Gun Club. 

For the effect of Barbican' s communication had 
not been circumscribed by the frontiers of the 
United States. It had bounded over the Atlan- 



154 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

tic and the Pacific, invading at once Europe, 
Asia, Africa and Oceanica. All the great ob- 
servatories of the Union immediately put them- 
selves in telegraphic communication with the 
observatories of foreign countries. Most of the 
latter flashed complimentary offers to the Gun 
Club. The warmest and most enthusiastic were 
the observatories of Paris, St. Petersburg, Berlin, 
Altona, the Cape of Good Hope, Stockholm, 
Hamburgh, Bologna, Dorpat, Milan, Rome, War- 
saw, Buda, Lisbon, Benares, Madras and Pekin. 
Others kept a prudent silence, waiting results. As 
for the great English Observatory of Green- 
wich, with the full approval of the twenty-two 
other observatories of Great Britain, it came out 
^^flat-footed** on the question. It boldly denied 
the possibility of success, and sided altogether 
with Captain McNichol. Instead of sending depu- 
tations to Tampa, as the other learned societies 
had promised to do, the Greenwich staff, in 
full assembly, the Astronomer Royal presiding, 
unanimously tabled Barbican* s communication, 
and passed on to the order of the day. All 
pure English jealousy and envy, nothing else. 
But as everybody had expected it, nobody minded 
it, and it had not the slightest effect in coun- 
teracting the popularity of the enterprise. 



THE FINANCIAL QUESTION. 155 

As a general rule it was the scientific men 
who showed the most enthusiastic interest in its 
success, but, what does not always happen, their 
hearty fervor, spreading among the masses, soon 
produced a general response from all ranks fully 
as ardent as their own. This was a most for- 
tunate result, as the zealous co-operation of the 
masses could easily meet an expense that other- 
wise would have soon swamped all the resources 
of the scientific men. 

On the 9th of October, Barbican had issued 
a manifesto, glowing with enthusiasm, intended 
for all the nations of the earth, and having for 
its motto the beautiful words of the angelic 
hymn, '* Et in Terra Pax ho7ninihus bonce volun- 
tatis T^ It was translated into all languages, 
and in a few months its accents resounded in 
every quarter of the globe. 

Subscription books were immediately opened 
in all the chief cities of the Union, the head 
ofSce being the Patapsco Bank, 13 St. Paul 
Street, Baltimore. The chief subscription offices 
in the two Continents, outside the United States, 
are given in the following list : 

Vienna : — Solomon Rothschild. 

St. Petersburg : — Thomson, Bonar & Co. 

Paris : — Drexel, Harjes & Co. 



156 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

Stockholm : — Arfwedson, Sutthoff & Co. 

London : — J. S. Morgan & Co. 

Turin : — Ardouin & Co. 

Berlin : — Mendelssohn. 

Geneva : — Lombard, Odier & Co. 

Constantinople : — The Imperial Ottoman Bank. 

Brussels : — Brugmann Fils. 

Madrid:— O'Shea, Goldsmith & Co. 

Seville :—Cahill, White & Beck. 

Amsterdam : — Hope & Co. 

Rome : — To.rlonia & Co. 

Lisbon : — Fortunato Chanico, Junior. 

Copenhagen : — Frolich & Co. 

Mexico : — Martin, Drana & Co. 

Rio Janeiro : — The Maua Bank. 

Buenos Ayres : — The O'Donoju Bank. 

Lima : — ^La Chambre & Co. 

Valparaiso : — Alsop & Co. 

The success of the subscription all through 
the United States was immediate and immense. 
Even in Philadelphia, the sedate *^ Quaker City,*' 
so eager was every one to contribute his share, 
that at an early hour of the evening previous 
to the day for opening the subscription books, 
the people began taking places along Chestnut 
street, in the neighborhood of the Bank of 
Pennsylvania. Some who could not conveni-^ 



THE FINANCIAL QUESTION. . 157 

ently stay up all night in the streets, hired boys 
to do it for them ; others even paid a handsome 
premium next morning for a good place in the 
line. Ex uno disce 07?ines, In less than a week 
after the appearance of Barbican *s circular, the 
subscriptions of the principal cities of the Union 
had amounted to the enormous sum of a little 
more than four millions of dollars. With such 
a snug balance in their favor, the Club need 
have no hesitation in commencing at once. But 
even from foreign countries the telegraphic dis- 
patches were equally encouraging. Some nations 
especially distinguished themselves by their lib- 
erality ; others, of course, *' forked over" with 
much less readiness — all a pure matter of tem- 
perament. 

Figures being more eloquent than words, we 
shall here give a short statement of the principal 
sums paid in by each country, and, at the close 
of the subscription, openly announced to be 
lying in the vaults of the Patapsco Bank, subject 
to the orders of the Baltimore Gun Club. 

Russia's contingency reached the very large 
sum of 368,733 rubles, nearly a quarter of a mil- 
lion dollars. Should any one be astonished at 
this generosity, he must remember that the 
scientific taste of the Russians is very highly 



158 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

developed, particularly in the direction of as- 
tronomy. They possess at least ten famous ob- 
servatories, of which two, one at Dorpat and 
the other at Pulkova, are at least equal to any 
in Europe. 

France, as usual, began by making fun of 
what she considered the irresistible ( h7ipayables) 
eccentricities of the Americans. The Moon be- 
came a target for every homme (T esprit, nine 
out of ten is the average in France, and no 
one could count the jokes, puns, epigrams and 
even vaudevilles made on the new ^' American 
notion." Patti's marriage was nothing to it. 
But a Frenchman often after his laugh, like an 
Englishman sometimes after his growl, is the most 
generous, if not the most sensible of men. It was 
so at least in the present instance. France laughed 
so heartily over the American absurdity that she 
ended by falling in love with it. Instantly the 
question arose : Who would do the most for its 
advancement ? It was just before the German 
war, when France was in a fine condition to 
gratify her scientific fancies to almost any extent. 
This accounts for her princely contribution of 
1,253,930 francs, more than a quarter of a mil- 
lion of dollars. The Americans took the money 
and never said a word about the jokes. 



THE FINANCIAL QUESTION. 159 

Austria showed herself, considering her serious 
financial embarrassment, very kind and generous 
indeed. Her contribution amounted to the sum 
of 216,000 florins, about 108,000 dollars, which 
were very thankfully received by the Club. 

52,000 riksdalers, or about 15,000 dollars, were 
contributed by the United Kingdoms of Sweden 
and Norway, a subsidy in tolerable proportion 
with the resources of these countries, but it would 
have probably been much more considerable had 
the subscription been opened in Christiania as 
well as in Stockholm. For some reason or 
other, the Norwegians have never liked sending 
their money to Sw^eden. 

Prussia showed her high appreciation of the 
American enterprise by a remittance of 250,000 
thalers, about 175,000 dollars. Her different 
observatories alone raised a large sum, and in 
other respects showed themselves extremely de- 
sirous to encourage the enterprise. 

Turkey also — in spite of the fact that her ex- 
penditures are far in excess of her revenue, and 
that the government publication of a budget ex- 
hibiting a surplus, is invariably followed by a new 
loan — showed herself remarkably liberal, though 
it cannot be denied that her interest in the 
enterprise partook af the selfish as w^ell as the 



160 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

purely scientific. Her years are altogether regu- 
lated by the Moon, particularly her celebrated 
ninth month, called Ra77iadan, the month of the 
great fast, when from dawn to sunset, from the 
moment a white thread can be distinguished 
from a black one, complete and entire absti- 
nence from all kinds of food and drink, even 
medicine, is strictly enjoined on every good 
Mussulman. As this holy month depends en- 
tirely on the Moon for its beginning and end, 
and is therefore impartially distributed through 
every season — sometimes occurring in the freezing 
depths of winter, sometimes in the roasting blaze 
of summer — it is easily seen that the Mahometans 
have very special reasons for regarding the 
beauteous Queen of Night with an interest far 
surpassing our own. Still I must say, that both 
the amount of the sum itself, 1,372,640 piastres, 
about 60,000 dollars, and the readiness with 
which it was contributed, were somewhat extraor- 
dinary for Turkey, and sm.acked decidedly of 
some gentle but very effectual *^hint" on the part 
of the Ottoman government. 

Among the States of the second class, Belgium 
distinguished herself by a donation of 513,000 
francs, about 102,500 dollars. This handsome 
sum — an average of 2^ cents for every inhabi- 



THE FINANCIAL QUESTION. 161 

taut, three times greater than the French average 
— spoke no less for the public spirit of the flour- 
ishing little kingdom than for her industry, and 
the prudence and honesty that kept her free 
from oppressive debt. 

Holland and her colonies interested themselves 
in the enterprise to the extent of 110,000 florins, 
about 44,000 dollars. Only as the Netherlanders 
are all good business men, they insisted on get- 
ting back a discount of five per cent, for cash. 

Denmark, though rather cramped both in terri- 
tory and population, still gave 42,264 rigsdalers, 
about 24,000 dollars, a sum showing that Tycho 
Brahe's countrymen are still interested in scien- 
tific inquiries. 

The North German Confederation pledged 
itself to the amount of 34,285 florins, about 
14,000 dollars. You could not ask her for 
more, and if you did she would not give it. 

Italy, though staggering under such a fearful 
public debt that the interest alone eats into half 
her revenue, contrived to scrape together 200,000 
liras, about 40,000 dollars, but it was only by 
turning her pockets inside out. In spite of the 
annexation of Venetia, and the confiscation of 
the Church property, she was still *^ hard up." 

Rome — this was before the invasion of Victor 



162 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

Emanuel — sent as her share 7040 scudos, almost 
exactly the same number of dollars ; and Portu- 
gal, though with a yearly increasing deficit, by 
a remittance of 20,376 milreis, about 23,000 
dollars, showed her good will towards the ad- 
vancement of science. 

Poor Mexico, in the middle of the troubles 
that ended so disastrously for Maximilian, could 
only give the widow's mite, 345 silver dollars. 
Maximilian is now dead and gone, but I have 
not heard that Mexico's condition is much im- 
proved. 

257 francs, or 51 dollars and 40 cents — such 
was the modest contribution of Switzerland to- 
wards the great American enterprise, I must 
speak plainly on the subject ; Switzerland looked 
on the idea altogether from a practical point of 
view : What was the good of sending a bullet 
to the Moon ? Was it not a pure waste of capi- 
tal ? How could it possibly ''pay"? There- 
fore, she politely begged to be excused taking 
stock in any such risky proceeding. After all, 
perhaps Switzerland was right. 

Spain could give no more than 220 reals, 
about II dollars. She said she had her rail- 
roads to build. The truth is that this was the 
time when Spain was engaged in her fight with 



THE FINANCIAL QUESTION, 163 

Queen Isabella, or rather when everybody was 
in a fight with everybody else, and nobody 
seemed to know what anybody wanted. Prim 
would be prime minister to-day ; an insurrection 
would put O'Donnell in his place to-morrow; 
on the next day Narvaez would be master of 
both. Then all would unite in a conspiracy 
against the Queen. No wonder if the subscrip- 
tion languished. Besides, Spain, once the head 
of the nations of Europe, is now, for want of 
a good government, one of the lowest. She has 
been fighting so much and so ineffectually that 
she seems to be relapsing into barbarism. Where- 
ever love of science is dying out, unreasoning 
terror takes its place. Too much occupied in 
getting up insurrections to read books, a pretty 
good number of Spaniards all over the kingdom, 
not calculating the relative proportions of the 
projectile and the Moon, were afraid that our 
satellite might be so much disturbed in her orbit 
by the shock, as to be unable to. keep her course. 
Therefore, she might either be compelled to 
wander off into space, or to fall to the surface 
of the earth. Neither contingency being pleas- 
ant to contemplate, they resolved to abstain from 
the subscription, which they did, with the ex- 
ception of the II dollars mentioned above. 



164 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

England yet remained to be heard from; but 
the manner in which the Greenwich Observatory 
authorities had acted, left little room for conject- 
ure regarding the nature of her answer. The 
fact is, that England, never very friendly, en- 
tertained at this time particularly bitter feelings 
against the United States for several reasons. 
The chief one was the Alabama claims, still un- 
settled, still difficult to settle, and, like Damocles' 
sword, hanging over her head, silent, glittering, 
terrible ; and her guilty conscience saw the thin 
thread growing thinner and thinner every day. 
Another was the Fenian troubles. The sudden 
ending of the Civil War had set free from both 
armies a few hundred of soldiers who, hardly 
knowing what to do with their spare time, and 
considering themselves injured by England, for 
her double dealing on the one side, and her 
blockade running on the other, thought they 
could bother her a little by kicking up a 
^^ shindy" in Ireland. Here again England's 
guilty conscience terribly frightened her, but. 
Heaven bless you ! she never thought of attribut- 
ing her terror to its real cause — her long con- 
tinued evil treatment of Ireland — but altogether 
to the inveterate animosity with which she con- 
sidered herself to be always regarded by the 



THE FINANCIAL QUESTION 165 

United States. Besides, the mortification of 
her old defeat still rankled in her breast. The 
crime of catching two of her fine armies, like a 
rat in a trap, was too great for ordinary human, 
not to talk of English, nature to forgive. When 
John Bull is in good humor, he may not be in- 
sensible to the cry of some great distress — a terri- 
ble conflagration for instance — but when his pride 
is hurt, his envy or jealousy aroused, or his 
money-making opportunities interfered with — 
that is, on an average nine times out of every 
ten — he buttons up his breeches-pocket as tight 
as a salamander safe, and would see you in 
Halifax before he gave you a single farthing. 
Of course he would try to conceal this absurd 
meanness by some high sounding title, the more 
inappropriate the better. In the present case 
the English refused the Baltimorians point blank, 
on the dignified principle of strict '^ non-inter- 
vention. '* '' It was so well known that England 
never interfered on any account in the affairs 
of other countries — witness India, Italy, Spain, 
Ashantee, etc. — that however willing she might 
feel under other circumstances to show her friend- 
ship for her trans-Atlantic Anglo-Saxon cousins, 
the brothers of her Shakspeare, etc., she could 
not now compromise her honor by departing in 



166 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

the slighest degree from the grand principle 
which it had been always her glory unswervingly 
to pursue/' So England did not send the 
United States as much money as would jingle 
in a tombstone. 

But the Baltimorians were soon consoled for 
this sulky refusal by a remittance from a quarter 
as welcome as it was unexpected. 

The very causes that had rendered England 
unfriendly towards the United States, had intensi- 
fied the contrary feeling in another part of the 
British Kingdom. Ireland had always hated 
England, and had always loved America. With 
very good reason : She had always been treated 
badly by the one, and always kindly by the 
other. Her people had risen to high places of 
honor and influence in the one country, without 
compromising either their faith or their patriot- 
ism ; this they had never done in the other 
country, without smothering, or at least suppress- 
ing both. In the years of her terrible famine, 
her cry of anguish had been heard at the other 
side of the Atlantic, and war ships laden with 
corn had sailed immediately for her relief. Since 
that time a stream of money had been con- 
stantly flowing from the West, like the Gulf 
Stream, towards the suffering island: every dollar 



THE FINANCIAL QUESTION, 167 

a new link in the great chain that attaches for 
ever the heart of Ireland to the people of the 
United States. Recent events had only strength- 
ened this feeling. In the great civil war her 
sons had fought bravely, on both sides it is 
true, but anyway was it not for America ? The 
question of the Alabama claims possessed an in- 
tense interest for them, because they knew it to 
be so embarrassing to their hereditary foe ; and 
the generally accepted report that American 
officers secretly directed the operations of the 
Fenian movement, made every Irish eye, for the 
time being, look on every American as something 
very little short of a regular angel. 

This being the case, it is not surprising that 
Ireland pursued a course on the present ques- 
tion most distinctly contrary to that of England. 
As soon as Barbican' s circular appeared in the 
papers, a self-appointed committee — not a scien- 
tific man among them except two : one a distin- 
guished chemist of Trinity College, the other a 
young professor of the Irish University — held its 
first meeting in a little room back of the Naiio7i 
office, Dublin, and that very evening sent a 
rousing appeal to the chief cities and towns of 
Ireland, calling their attention to the great Balti- 
more project, and soliciting their immediate and 



168 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

warm support. The idea was everywhere em- 
braced with enthusiasm, and, to make a long 
story short, in less than two weeks the com- 
mittee were able to send to America the credita- 
ble sum of 11,625 pounds sterling, about 60,000 
dollars. This was accompanied by a letter 
stating that the remittance was exactly one-half 
penny a head for every man, woman, and child 
in Ireland, but that if it was ten pounds a head 
it would still fall far short of showing the 
gratitude and kindly feelings entertained by 
Ireland for America. In' a postscript it was 
added that poor old Baltimore (the little fishing 
village in the south of Ireland, which had given 
Lord Baltimore his title), had sent all she could 
to her big, full grown, beautiful daughter across 
the ocean, the small sum of one pound ten, 
but her best blessings had gone along with it 1 
The reading of this letter caused a very pleas- 
ant excitement in the Club Room, and J. T. 
Marston, who being a New Englander, had 
of course always been pretty hard on the Irish, 
wrote a recantation on the spot. It was com- 
posed in his best style, and he was so well 
pleased with it himself that he had it published 
a few days afterwards in the New York Herald, 
but nobody ever read it. 



THE FINANCIAL QUESTION. 169 

The chief States of South America, namely, 
Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Chili, Bolivia, and Ar- 
gentina, together with a few of the smaller 
republics, having contributed for their share a 
little more than 300,000 dollars, the Club now 
found itself master of the very considerable 
capital represented as follows : 

Total subcriptions from the United States, $4,000,000 

Total subscriptions from foreign States, 1,446,675 

Total, §5,446,675 

But large as this sum undoubtedly was, every 
cent of it would be required. After paying all 
the expenses attendant on the casting, the bo- 
ring, the masonry, the transport of the workmen, 
and their support in an almost uninhabited 
country, the construction of furnaces and machine 
shops, the supply of tools, the powder, the projec- 
tile, not to mention the thousand and one inciden- 
tal expenses impossible to foresee — after paying all 
these, very little of the 5}^ millions would be 
left. But what matter? During the Federal war 
every ball shot by certain cannons was said to 
cost the government a thousand dollars. Barbi- 
can's ball, unique and unprecedented in the annals 
of gunnery, could be readily excused for costing 
five hundred times as much. 



170 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

On the twentieth of October, a contract was 
concluded with the Cold Spring Iron Company, 
at whose great works on Harlem Creek, not far 
from New York, the largest and most reliable 
Parrott guns had been cast during the war. By 
this contract, in consideration of a certain sum, 
the company pledged itself to transport to 
Tampa, a town in Florida, on the Gulf of 
Mexico, all material, whatever, necessary for 
the casting of the Columbiad. There the whole 
operation was to be performed, and the cannon 
delivered in good condition, at a period of 
time no later than the 15th of the following 
October, under pain of forfeiting a hundred dol- 
lars a day until such time as the Moon should 
present herself again in the same conditions ; 
that is to say, in 18 years and 11 days. The 
company was furthermore to hire, pay, support 
and take general care of the workmen. 

This contract, carefully written out and dupli- 
cated, was duly signed, sealed, and delivered on 
the part of the Gun Club by J. P. Barbican, 
President, and on the part of the company by 
John Murphy, Director and Chief Engineer, as 
well as the Superintendent of the Iron Works, 
Cold Spring, Harlem, near New York. 



CHAPTER XIII. 



STONY HILL. 



As soon as the decided preference of Florida 
for Texas by the Gun Club was officially an- 
nounced, every American that knew how to 
read — which is equivalent to saying all without ex- 
ception — considered it his sacred duty to study up 
the geography and history of the fortunate State. 

Luckily, works treating on the subject were 
abundant enough. Those most sought after by 
the general reader were : 

The Conquest of Florida, by Don Fernando de 
Soto and his 600 followers (a translation from 
the Spanish) j The Sj>anish Main, the Floridas, 
with some account of the Se7?iinole Cannibals (of 
which more anon) ; A Journey up the St. John's, 
by John Bartram of Philadelphia, Botanist j W. 
Darby's Me?noir on the Geography and History 
of Florida J Theodore Irving' s Conquest of 
Florida. The last three Philadelphia publica- 
tions, being rather antiquated, aroused in the 
public mind a keener desire for more modern 
works. Of these the chief favorites were : 

(171) 



172 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

J. T. Sprague's Florida War ; Parkman's 
Huguenots in Florida^ and Professor Bailey's 
Microscopical Researches in Florida, At school, 
instead of the ordinary French Reader, the 
children read Vue de la Floride Occidentale, and 
Volney's Fclaircissements sur la Floride; and 
the young ladies and gentlemen taking Spanish 
lessons, threw aside Don Quixote for La verdadera 
Historia de la Florida del Inca, by Garcilasso 
de la Vega. The works were numerous enough, 
as already mentioned, but the books in print 
could not supply the thousandth part of the de- 
mand. In less than a day all the old stock 
on the shelves was thoroughly cleared out, and 
the public had to groan impatiently for the 
next few days, while new editions were being 
hurried through the press with all the dispatch 
the quickest printers in the world were capable 
of. It was during this interval that a little 
episode occurred which, as it is by no means 
unusual in the book business, and as it furnished 
food for a good deal of public comment at. the 
time, may as well be here related. 

A great Philadelphia publishing house had 
been very much pleased with the appearance of 
the second book given on our list. The title 
was catching, the style was neat and crisp, the 



STOXY HILL. 173 

information was sensible and interesting, but, 
above all, the work was English, no copyright 
was to be paid, and therefore it was a goose 
chockful of golden eggs, the legitimate and well 
established prey of whoever made the first grab ! 
It was at once stereotyped, an edition of 5,000 
copies prepared for immediate sale, and 5,000 
more announced to be ready in a few days. 
Unfortunately, a great Boston publishing house, 
having been equally captivated by the same 
seductive points of the work, announced an edi- 
tion of 10, coo copies to be ready the very 
same day. The two great houses were tele- 
graphing to each other some possible means of 
effecting a compromise, when, most unfortu- 
nately of all, a great New York publishing 
house, decoyed by the very same identical ap- 
petizing charms of the book, announced in the 
evening papers as ready for immediate sale an 
edition of 15,000 copies ! Then it was war to 
the knife. As a newspaper wit of great origi- 
nality remarked, it was the terrible encounter 
of pirates over the prostrate body of their vic- 
tim. The published price of the book had 
been about two dollars j this the Philadelphian 
immediately cut down to one dollar. The 
Bostonian replied by reducing the price to fifty 



174 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

cents. The great New York house demoralized 
them both by offering the work for nothing at 
all ! The plucky Philadelphian, recovering from 
the blow, and determined to do something for 
the honor of his city, offered his book also for 
nothing, but accompanying it with the beautiful 
chromo of '* The Babes in the WoodV The 
proud Bostonian^s premium to every one 
accepting a copy of his book, immediately rose 
to a neat BoydelV s Shakspeare by the Heliotype 
process. But the gigantic New Yorker com- 
pletly knocked the wind out of both his oppo- 
nents, by offering the enormous premium of a 5 
years' subscription to his magazine together with 
one share in the great Centennial Stocky the par 
value of which was ten dollars ! 

The best part of the joke, however, was to 
come. The book was not English at all, but 
the work of an old gentleman of Delaware, 
who had written the book about 30 years before, 
published it at his own expense and carefully 
taken out a regular copyright. The work, though 
really a good one, not appearing at the right 
time, naturally mouldered on the shelves, and 
at last found its way to the trunkmakers — all 
but one copy. This had somehow caught the 
eye of a London publisher, who found it to 



STONY HILL. 175 

his advantage to give the public an edition 
or two, being very careful, however, to suppress 
the name of the author, and in fact everything 
in the work that might betray its American 
origin. 

No one was more surprised at the resuscita- 
tion of the book than the author himself; but 
acting under the advice of one of those Phila- 
delphia lawyers, who are famous all over the 
Union for their superior shrewdness, he kept 
perfectly quiet at first, and for a little while 
enjoyed the sublime sight of a publisher pound- 
ing his rivals to jelly, and then standing over 
them in majestic attitude, eye flashing scorn, 
and terrible arm lifted on high to '' crush" the 
next one who would be mad enough to pro- 
voke his ire. Then, by the advice of his lawyer, 
the old gentleman wrote the great New Yorker 
a polite note, explaining the whole case and 
enclosing a bill for ^3,000, the author's usual 
royalty at 10 per cent, on the published price. 
The Bostonian and the Philadelphian received 
equally polite notes, enclosing equally peremptory 
demands. All remonstrances were in vain. 
How resist the author's claims on a work of such 
unprecedented popularity, 30,000 copies having 
been disposed of in three days ? The six thousand 



176 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

dollars had to be paid, and were paid, to the 
great joy of the public at large. Perhaps in 
no country in the world is there a greater love 
of even handed justice than in America ; there- 
fore nobody pitied the poor great publishing 
houses ; on the contrary, the unanimous verdict 
from all quarters was, ^^ served them right !** 

These inanities, you may be sure, never 
troubled Barbican, who had something better to 
do than bother his head with books. One of 
his maxims was, '^ Read to know; then stop^ 
He sometimes quoted another : ^^ A great reader 
is a poor thhtker, and a poor thinker is a poor 
creature,'*^ He would trust nobody with the 
selection of a site for the Columbiad, and he 
wished to see everything with his own eyes. 
Accordingly, without losing an instant, in the 
name of the Gun Club, he placed in the hands 
of the Director of the Cambridge Observatory, 
money enough to pay for a large telescope, the 
construction of which Professor Belfast had 
promised to superintend. Then having made 
a contract with the house of Meneely & Co., 
Albany, for casting the aluminium projectile, he 
started from Baltimore, accompanied by Marston, 
Elphinstone, and also Murphy, the Director of 
the Cold Spring Iron Works. The bad condi- 



STONY HILL. ±71 

tion of the Southern railroads, which had not 
yet recovered from the damaging effects of the 
war, put their patience to the test, but in less 
than a week the travellers had arrived in New 
Orleans, embarked in the Wissahickon, a United 
States revenue cutter which the government had 
placed at their disposal, and found themselves 
in the midst of the dreary region called the 
Delta of the Mississippi, sailing down one of 
the mouths through which that mighty river 
discharges its waters into the Gulf of Mexico. 
The low coast of Louisiana soon disappeared, 
their eyes ceased to trace the line that for hun- 
dreds of miles separated the fresh water of the 
river from the salt water of the gulf, the warm 
breezes of the tropics played around them, the 
Wissahickon steamed on at the rate of ten miles 
an hour, and on the second morning after leav- 
ing New Orleans, the flat, barren shores of 
Florida came into view. Skirting, for some 
time, several low lying keys and many little 
creeks, rich in oysters, lobsters and turtles, the 
steamer at last entered the fine harbor formerly 
called Espiritu Santo, but now generally known 
as Tampa Bay. It is about twenty miles long, 
and at its northern end, a projecting tongue of 
land divides it into two smaller bays or havens, 



178 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

that of Old Tampa on the northwest, that of 
Hillsborough on the northeast. It was into the 
latter that the Wissahickon headed, full steam ; 
the batteries of Fort Brooke were not long in 
revealing themselves ; the chimneys of the little 
town of Tampa were soon percdved ; and early 
in the evening of October 29th, the steamer 
cast anchor in a small natural port formed at 
the point where the Hillsborough river entered 
the bay. 

Barbican felt his heart beating with unusual 
violence the moment he touched the soil of 
Florida. His feet seemed to test its capacity, 
as a doctor feels his patient, an architect sounds 
a doubtful wall, or as a smith taps the wheels 
of a train before it is allowed to start on a 
new trip. 

^^ Gentlemen,'* he cried earnestly to his com- 
panions, '^ there's not one moment to be lost. 
To-morrow morning at day-break we shall ex- 
amine the country on horseback " 

He would probably have said more if he had 
not been cut short by a sight that actually froze 
the marrow in his bones. This was a proces- 
sion formed by the 796 inhabitants of Tampa, 
men, women, and children, white and black, 
headed by Squire Jones, the longest winded 




TAMPA TOWN PREVIOUS TO THE UNDERTAKING. 



STONY HILL. 179 

orator that ever spoke in Tallahassee, carrying 
all kinds of flags, banners and streamers, and 
shouting fearfully. It was in fact a grand parade 
got up for the occasion, and intended as a high 
mark of honor for the illustrious President of 
the famous Gun Club, whose choice had con- 
ferred such an eternal distinction on their city. 
They had been all up since day-break ready to 
receive him, but the poor people, becoming tired 
with the delay, had tried to amuse themselves 
by firing off the cannon until they ran out of 
powder. Then a part had gone home to get 
something to eat ; another part had adjourned 
to the taverns to get something to drink ; in- 
deed they had almost completely forgotten their 
expected visitors, when the sudden cry startled 
them that the vessel was in sight. It took so 
much time to form the demoralized masses into 
line, that Barbican and his friends had been per- 
mitted to land in peace — a most fortunate circum- 
stance, for the loud shouts and energetic gestures 
of the advancing multitude reminded the Presi- 
dent of the Gun Club more painfully than pleas- 
antly of a similar ovation which had nearly cost 
him his life in Baltimore. Being a man of 
quick decision, his resolution was formed in an 
instant. Instead of waiting for the crowd, he 



180 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

plunged headlong into it, where, as nobody 
knew him, nobody could shake hands with him, 
or, still worse, harangue him ; so that he soon 
reached the De Soto Hotels where he immedi- 
ately locked himself up in his room, positively 
refusing admission to all strangers. A great 
crowd remained up all night under his window, 
shouting, playing music, and roaring '* speech ! 
speech !" A volley of stones even would every 
now and then rattle against his shutters, but 
they never disturbed his slumbers for a moment ; 
all night long he slept the sleep of the just. 
Decidedly Barbican would have made a splendid 
President of the United States. He had pre- 
cisely the temperament that would never permit 
him to take pleasure in acting ** the great 
man.'' 

He was up next morning before sunrise, brisk 
as a bee, and after a hasty breakfast, the four 
artillerists started on their tour of observation, 
mounted on those well known small sized horses 
of Spanish blood that are so full of fire and 
vigor. Though late iii October, the thermome- 
ter marked 84° in the shade, but this excessive 
temperature was much modified by the cool morn- 
ing sea breezes. 

Quitting Tampa, the little troop took a 



STONY HILL. 181 

southerly direction, skirting the eastern shore of 
the bay till they came to a small stream called 
Bullfrog Creek, emptying into it eight or ten 
miles below Tampa. Turning their horses' 
heads eastwardly, they followed the right bank 
of this creek for some time with much difficulty, 
the horses sinking almost to the knees in 
mud and sand, though Barbican was repeatedly 
assured by one of the guides that they were on 
the great military road leading to Fort Meade. 
Soon they lost sight of the waters of the bay 
altogether, and veritable Floridian landscapes 
alone presented themselves to their eyes. 

Florida, one of the United States, may be con- 
sidered as divided into two parts : the northern, 
healthier, more advantangeous every way, and 
therefore more thickly settled, contains, besides 
Tallahassee, the capital, St. Augustine, the oldest 
town in the United States, and the flourishing 
modern cities of Jacksonville and Pensacola ; 
the other part, a projecting tongue of land, is 
the well known peninsula, about 300 miles long 
by 50 wide, washed on one side by the Atlantic 
Ocean, on the other by the Gulf of Mexico, with 
its southern extremity gnawed into thousands of 
keys or reefs by the tropical waters of the famous 
Gulf Stream, which here seems to take its rise. 



182 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

The whole State, almost exactly the size of Eng- 
land and Wales united, is larger in area than 
either Illinois or Iowa. It was in a region con- 
siderably south of the centre that Barbican had to 
find a suitable locality for his great enterprise ; 
this was no easy task, considering the profile 
of the country and the alluvial nature of the 
soil. 

In 1512, twenty years after the discovery of 
America, the adventurous old hidalgo Ponce de 
Leon sailed northwest from San Domingo in 
search of the fabled Waters of Eternal Youth, 
On Easter Sunday, called by the Spaniards 
Pascua Florida, the festival of flowers, he struck 
the coast of the main land and named it Florida, 
the land of flowers, which is therefore the proper 
name of the North American Continent. But 
however appropriate the name might be for the 
country at large, the barren and burning coasts 
of the peninsula could lay little claim to the 
charming appellation. Such at least was the 
first idea that occurred to our Gun Club men. 
However, a few miles from the seaboard the 
nature of the soil began to change by degrees, 
and the country looked as if it really had some 
right to its name. The sand began to disap- 
pear under the masses of verdure, and the ex- 



STONY HILL, 183 

plorers soon found themselves in the midst of 
a net work of creeks, tarns, pools, ponds and 
little lakes. You could have easily imagined 
yourself in Holland or in Guiana. As they 
advanced they gradually reached higher ground, 
and soon came to vast plains, capable of 
producing every vegetable of the North and 
South in the greatest abundance. Little need 
for cultivating soil like that j the tropical sun 
and the moisture retained in the rich clay, did 
all the hard work. *^ Tickle it with a harrow,*' 
as Marston said, quoting somebody, ^' and it 
will smile with eternal harvests 1" Finally they 
came to those vast fields where pine apples, 
sweet potatoes, tobacco, rice, cotton, sugar cane, 
extending further than the eye could reach, 
displayed their treasures in the most prodigal 
and luxuriant profusion. 

But it was the gradually increasing elevation 
of the land that gave Barbican the most pleasure. 
To a remark of Marston' s on the beauty of the 
scenery, he replied somewhat absentmindedly : 

*^ Yes, my dear friend, it is a necessity of 
the first order that our Columbiad be cast in 
ground of commanding elevation." 

*' To be nearer to the Moon?" asked the 
Secretary. 



184 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

'^ Oh, no/' replied the President with a quiet 
smile. ^^ What signifies the difference of a few- 
rods, more or less ? On elevated ground, you 
know, our labor will be both diminished and 
simplified. We shall not have to contend with 
the water by means of hard pumping and ex- 
pensive tubing — a very important consideration 
when you remember that we have to sink a pit 
nine hundred feet deep." 

^^ You are quite right, Mr. Barbican," ob- 
served Murphy, who was to superintend the 
works personally. *' We must, of course, do 
everything possible to avoid water, but if, in 
spite of all our efforts, water will come, we 
shall soon get rid of it by pumping it off or 
turning it aside. This is not like sinking an 
Artesian well, narrow, dark, deep, where the 
bits, the reamers, the sinkers, the augers, all 
the boring tools in fact, are compelled to work 
where no eye can see to direct their operations. 
I know all the difficulties presented by the bo- 
ring of rocks, having sunk wells in the oil regions 
of Pennsylvania for a year and a half. I even 
helped Major Welton to bore the Artesian well 
at Charleston — the hardest job I ever had in 
all my life. And we got only salt water after 
all. Digging out our well here will be mere 



STONY HILL, 185 

child's play. We shall work under the open 
sky, with plenty of room ; the pick, the spade 
and the shovel will be quite enough ; except the 
help we get from a blast now and then. Oh, 
we shall get along famously, I promise you/' 

^^ However,** replied Barbican, *Mf by the 
elevation of our ground above the surrounding 
level, or by its favorable nature, we can avoid 
difficulties resulting from water or quicksands, 
our labor will be so much rapider and more 
satisfactory. Let us, therefore, try to sink our 
shaft in the summit of some hill, if possible a 
few hundred it^x above the level of the sea." 

*' Quite correct, Mr. Barbican, and I have 
no doubt that in a short time we shall come 
across what suits you exactly. * ' 

'^ I should like to see the first stroke of the 
pick," said the President. 

** And I the last!" exclaimed Marston. 

^^ The last will come as sure as the first," 
observed the engineer. '^ Our company knows 
better than to make itself liable to the forfeit." 

*' By the great United States ! I should think 
it did," cried Marston. ^^ Do you know how 
much a hundred dollars a day for i8 years and 
1 1 days amounts to ? Do you know that it 
comes to the snug little sum of 658,100 dollars?" 



186 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

^^ No, sir/' answered Murphy, ^^ I don't know 
anything about it ; we never took the trouble 
of calculating what we shall never have to pay.'* 

After a short halt, at the point where the Fort 
Meade trail broke off, the little band resumed 
their march. Quitting the fertile flats, they 
soon entered the forest region, where they 
found themselves surrounded by almost every 
species of tropical trees, growing in truly tropi- 
cal profusion. They could hardly follow the 
trail through the labyrinth of pomegranate-, 
orange-, citron-, olive-, apricot-, and banana-trees, 
hung with exuberant vines, rich in color and 
fragrant in perfume. In the balmy shade of 
these magnificent developments, countless thou- 
sands of birds flashed and glittered in plumage 
of the most brilliant dye. The most conspicuous 
among them was a beautiful little heron, the gold 
winged fire-bird^ as it is called by the natives. 
The sight of it threw the excitable Marston 
almost into an ecstacy. ^^ It is not a nest," 
he cried, ^' but a precious jewel case that should 
enshrine a gem of such oriental effulgency !'' El- 
phinstone and Murphy, though in a quieter way, 
expressed their great delight at all they saw. 

But the splendor of this wonder-land was all 
lost on Barbican. Nay, the prodigal fertility. 



STONY HILL. 187 

SO indicative of the presence of water, positively 
annoyed him. Dry, solid ground was what he 
looked for, and that he knew he could not 
find where vegetation flourished in such unstinted 
measure. 

Onward, therefore, was still the cry. They 
had to ford several creeks and even rivers — a 
feat not always quite free from danger, as alli- 
gators twelve or fifteen feet long would some- 
times approach to a proximity too close for 
comfort. Marston's fierce shouts and occasional 
pop with a pistol seemed to have hardly the 
effect of frightening even the pelicans, strawtail 
ducks, green herons, and the other wild denizens 
of these untravelled regions, where the orange-red 
flamingo quietly regarded the travellers with the 
innocent stare of unsuspecting stupidity. 

Finally, the waders, the web-footers, the spoon- 
bills, and the other birds that favor marshy 
bottom lands, disappeared in their turn ; the 
trees gradually decreased in diameter, the forest 
became less dense, the trail less encumbered, 
the ascent steeper and more decided, and the 
rich sunlight streaming through, the branches 
rendered the labor of the guides superfluous. 
The little party soon left the tropical forest al- 
together, and, approaching the pine region, for 



188 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

the first time they had an unobstructed view 
over the great park-like plains before them, where 
several herds of frightened deer could be seen 
scampering in all directions. 

All at once Barbican 's eye flashed with excite- 
ment and his pale cheek flushed red, as at a 
sudden turn he caught sight of a rocky mound 
about half a mile further on, a few hundred 
feet in height, of easy ascent, and its flat 
summit comprising an area of probably twenty 
or thirty acres. 

*^ Halt !" he cried in thrilling tones. 'MVe 
have exactly what we want. Guides, have you 
a name for that eminence yonder?" 

"The Tampa people call it Stony Hill,'* replied 
the younger and more intelligent of the guides, 
" but the Seminoles call it Fliakleena, meaning, 
as I have heard, the mound of the white bones, ''^ 

Barbican wrote down " Stony Hiir* in his 
tablet and pushed on without another word, 
but Elphinstone's curiosity being somewhat ex- 
cited, he asked : 

" Why do they give it such a strange name ?'' 

" Because for hundreds of years it was white 
all over with the bones of the Spaniards slain 
in the great massacre.'' 

*' What Spaniards?'* asked the Major. 



STONY HILL 189 

"What massacre?'* asked Marston, also some- 
what interested. 

" The massacre of those Spaniards who, shortly 
after the country was discovered, tried to reach 
the interior, in search of gold, silver and dia- 
monds. They landed in Tampa Bay.'* 

"Well?'' asked the Major and Marston in 
one breath, 

" Well, gentlemen, luck, you see, was dead 
against them. In the first place, there was no 
gold, nor silver, nor diamonds in Florida. Then 
their fleet got destroyed by a tornado, and at 
last themselves were all massacred by the united 
Creeks, Euchees, and Chickasaws." 

"And Seminoles," suggested Marston. 

" No, gentlemen, excuse me j there were no 
Seminoles, you see, in those days, being as Semi- 
nole is the name given to the runaway Indians 
of all the other tribes." 

" Did the massacre take place on that hill ?" 
asked the Major. 

" So they say," answered the guide. " There 
they made their last stand, and all perished to 
a man, except a few who were taken prisoners 
and escaped at last, after many years' captivity." 

"Are the bones to be seen there now?" 
asked the Major. 



190 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

'^ Oh; no ; in the Seminole war General Gaines, 
considering the hill as a good point for a fort, 
had them all cleared off and burned or buried, 
I don't know which/* 

'* Did you ever see the bones yourself?" asked 
the Major. 

*^ I was too young myself, at the time, but 
my father often said he saw them.*' 

'^ Or said he saw the man that saw the man 
that said he saw the man that saw them !" 
laughed Marston incredulously. 

^^ Marston,'* said the Major quietly, ** it is an 
established fact in early Floridian history that 
Narvaez, so well known in connection with Cor- 

tez " 

I* 

^* Who knocked his eye out — vide Prescott,'* 
interrupted Marston. 

^' Exactly ; Narvaez, jealous of the great con- 
queror of Mexico, landed somewhere in Florida, 
about 1528, and perished there with all his 
companions except four, one of whom, Vaca, 
afterwards wrote a history of the disastrous expedi- 
tion. But I always thought that it was the 
northwest part of the country that had been 
the theatre of their sufferings. Surely, Vaca, 
the first historian of North America, could not 
have been guilty of a false statement." 



STONY HILL, 191 

" Of course not !'* laughed Marston, '' con- 
sidering the infallibility of historians generally." 

By this time they reached the summit, where 
they found Barbican, on foot, coat off, hard at 
work, trying to take the bearings of the locality 
by means of an improved portable theodolite 
of the latest pattern, which he had taken the 
trouble of carrying in his own hands all the 
way from Tampa. His companions formed a 
little group near him, keeping perfect silence 
and watching his proceedings with the utmost 
interest. 

They had made such good time on the road 
as to reach the hill a little before high noon. 
Consequently, the sun at this moment was cross- 
ing the meridian, which shortened Barbican's 
calculations so considerably that in a few min- 
utes he was able to give his friends the follow- 
ing result of his observations : 

'^ This hill, nearly a thousand feet above the 
level of the sea, lies in 27° 7' north latitude by 
5^ 7' west longitude, counting from the meridian 
of Washington. It is probably the highest 
point in southern Florida, its base being washed 
by the head waters of the chief rivers : the 
St. John's on the east, the Withlacoochee on 
the north, the Pea Creek on the southwest, and 



192 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

on the south the countless streams that flow 
into Lake Okeechobee. By its position, its 
dryness, its rocky soil mixed with sandy allu- 
vium, it appears to me to possess every condition 
desirable for the success of our experiment. Here 
then on this plateau shall rise our store houses, 
our workshops, our foundries, and the habita- 
tions of our workmen. And it is from this 
very spot,^' he added emphatically, stamping 
strongly as he spoke, ^^ from this very spot, 
the highest point of Stony Hill, that our pro- 
jectile '' 

** Shall wing her triumphant way through the 
boundless fields of ether towards our peerless 
Satellite's resplendent orb !'* struck in Marston, 
who could never resist the temptation of giving 
vent to the fiery inspirations of his grand 
Byronic soul. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

SPADE, SHOVEL, PICK AND TROWEL. 

Though it was late that evening when the 
exploring party returned to Tampa, Mr. Murphy, 
unwilling to lose any time, started at once in 
the Wissahickon for New Orleans. Thence he 
was to telegraph to the great cities of the North 
for the army of workmen already collected 
there by his foresight, and who were now im- 
patiently awaiting his signal. The Gun Club 
men remained at Tampa, where they had no 
dif&culty in obtaining all the help they needed 
for starting the preliminary operations* 

In less than two weeks, jMurphy was back 
again in the Wissahickon^ accompanied by several 
other smaller steamers, containing in all about 
fifteen hundred first-rate hands. He had ex- 
perienced no difficulty in obtaining them. The 
famous climate of Florida, the renown and 
popularity of the enterprise, and, above all, the 
offer of very liberal wages, had secured to him 
the very pick and choice of the best workmen 

in every department. ISIachinists and firemen 
13 (193) 



194 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

from New England, foundrymen and brick- 
makers from Philadelphia, lime-burners from 
New York, miners from Pennsylvania, Irish 
railway laborers, Negro hod carriers, together 
with masons, bricklayers, carpenters and smiths 
— all had been personally selected in the most 
favorable localities, and it is not too much to 
say that for intelligence, industry, cheerfulness, 
and general good conduct it would be hard to 
match such a body of men in any other country. 
Many of them had even brought their families 
along — the very want most felt in the South, 
where Nature, lavishing her gifts in most bounti- 
ful measure, requires the genial fingers of labor 
to prune their rank luxuriance. 

On the nth of November, at lo o'clock in the 
morning, the little fleet landed at Tampa, and 
you may guess what bustle, activity and confusion 
consequently prevailed immediately in a small 
town whose population was tripled in the course 
of a few hours. In fact, from this day forward 
the worldly prosperity of the place advanced with 
gigantic strides, not merely on account of the im- 
mense number of workmen and their families, 
for many of whom food and shelter were to be 
found, but also from the great crowds of strangers 
impelled by curiosity to converge from all 



SPADE, SHOVEL, PICK AND TROWEL. 195 

quarters of the world to this one point of the 
peninsula. As it was expressed by the clever 
correspondent of the Boston Globe, who always 
hits on grand historical contrasts, ^' Tampa and 
the Gun are the precursors of Philadelphia and 
the Centennial." 

The first days were spent in discharging the 
vessels of the machinery, the tools, the provi- 
sions, and likewise of a great number of cast iron 
frame buildings, with the pieces marked and 
numbered, so as to be put together and taken 
apart at pleasure. In the meantime Barbican 
had set with his own hand the first sleeper of 
a railroad about twenty miles in length, that 
was to connect Stony Hill with Tampa. He 
also projected another railroad to connect Tampa 
with Waldo, on the Gulf Railroad, This would 
have placed him in immediate and direct com- 
munication by rail with Baltimore and the 
North, and for awhile he was very earnest 
about it. But he abandoned the idea at once, 
as soon as he learned that in all probability he 
would have to finish the main road as well as 
the branch road, work on the Gulf Raib'oad 
having been suspended for some time, and its 
resumption being anything but probable. Though 
a scientist and a patriot, he was also an honor- 



196 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

able man, and therefore he never dreamed of 
spending other people's money in any other 
way than in strictly forwarding the views for 
which it had been subscribed. Not only that, 
but by his extraordinary intelligence, his untir- 
ing energy, his wonderful ubiquity, his inspirit- 
ing enthusiasm, his decided conviction of ulti- 
mate success, his friendly thoughtfulness for the 
comforts of the workmen, but above all, by his 
unscrupulous honesty which never tolerated impo- 
sition from any quarter — he actualty wrought 
wonders ; the railroad was finished in a short 
time j it had neither deep cuttings nor high 
bridges, nor did it attempt to follow a straight 
line ; yet it was safe and tolerably smooth ; its 
expense was comparatively small, and it had cost 
no human life whatever — a decided contrast 
with the Aspinwall and Panama Railroad^ 
whose sleepers are said to rest on the bones of 
the perished laborers ! 

In fact Barbican was the life and soul of the 
whole enterprise. No difficulty, no obstacle, 
no embarrassment could conquer him. His prac- 
tical genius always contrived some plan to over- 
come them all. He was by turns miner, mason, 
machinist, draughtsman, with a ready answer 
for every question, and a ready solution for 



SPADE, SHOVEL, PICK AND TROWEL. 197 

every problem. He corresponded daily with 
the Gun Club or the works at Cold Spring, 
and the Wissahickon kept up steam day and 
night, waiting his orders in Hillsboro Bay. 

About the middle of November he left Tampa, 
accompanied by a detachment of workmen, and 
the very next day a little city of frame houses 
was erected around the foot of Stony Hill. It 
was soon surrounded by a neat fence, and from 
its bustle, stir and life, you might for a moment 
take it for one of the great cities of the Union. 
Strict discipline prevailed in everything, and 
the works were immediately commenced with 
perfect order and system. 

Having ascertained the geological nature of 
the hill by some careful boring and drilling, 
Barbican called his foremen together on the 
morning of November 19th, and addressed them 
as follows : 

'* You know already, my friends, why we 
are all assembled here on this wild spot in 
Florida. We have to cast a cannon measuring 
nine feet in the interior diameter, six feet in 
thickness, and nineteen feet and a half from its 
external surface to the outside of the stone wall 
that is to surround it. We have, therefore, to 
excavate a pit sixty feet in diameter and nine 



198 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

hundred feet in depth. This serious piece of 
work must be completed in eight months ; there- 
fore you have 2,543,400 cubic feet of earth to 
remove in 223 days, omitting Sundays, or, say in 
round numbers, 11,500 cubic feet per day. This 
amount of work would not present any serious 
difficulty to a thousand workmen who had plenty 
of elbow-room, but it will prove rather embarrass- 
ing by being confined within such comparatively 
narrow limits. Nevertheless, as the work has 
got to be done, done it must be, and I rely 
on your energy as firmly as I do on your intel- 
ligence." 

That very morning at eight o'clock precisely, 
Barbican led off the operations by breaking 
ground himself with the spade. From this day 
forward until the work was completed, that 
valiant weapon, the queen of implements, never 
rested one moment idle in the hands of 
the w^orkmen, except for twenty-four hours 
every week, from 12 o'clock Saturday night 
until 12 o'clock on the following Sunday. Even 
in the wilds of Florida, Barbican insis- 
ted on the Christian Sabbath being observed 
as a day of holy rest. On that blessed day 
even the horses were not disturbed, and were 
allowed a double allowance of food. Moreover, 



SPADE, SHOVEL, PICK AND TROWEL. 199 

on that day, as clergymen of different denomi- 
nations held divine service on the hill, Metho- 
dists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Catholics could 
be seen worshipping within sight of each other in 
perfect harmony. What country but x\merica 
could show such a sight ? The men were told 
off in squads and relieved each other every six 
hours. 

The job, though a colossal one, by no means 
exceeded the limits of human resources. Far 
from it. Many works of a similar nature, but 
of far greater real difficulty, have been brought to 
a successful termination. To give one or two in- 
stances out of many, it will be enough to mention 
the famous JosepK s Well, constructed at Cairo, 
Egypt, by the Sultan Saladin, 700 years ago, a 
period when machinery multiplying the strength 
of man was unknown. This well, a parallelo- 
gram in shape, 20 feet by 12, is nearly three 
hundred feet in depth. Still more remarkable 
is the well in Orvieto, Italy, called St. Patrick' s 
Well, in honor of the patron saint of Ireland. 
It is 180 feet in depth, 46 feet in diameter, and 
encloses two spiral staircases, so that you can de- 
scend by the one and ascend by the other. It 
was excavated through the solid rock on which 
the city is built, by San Gallo for Pope Clement 



200 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

VII., in 1527. What then was to be done at 
Stony Hill? Nothing more difficult than to make 
the depth five times greater, with 14 feet increase 
of diameter, which would render the work much 
more convenient. That was all ! Not a single 
man, whether boss or laborer, had the least doubt 
of the ultimate success of the work. 

A happy thought of Mr. Murphy's considera- 
bly accelerated the progress of the operation. An 
article of the contract has spoken of binding 
the Columbiad with red hot hoops of wrought 
iron. Such a precaution being useless, as the 
engine could easily dispense with all such com- 
pressing bands, this clause was cancelled, and 
much time saved in consequence, as there was 
nothing to prevent them now from em.ploying 
the new plan adopted in sinking wells. This 
is, simply to begin building the wall as soon 
as the pick reaches the solid foundation, and 
to continue the mason work as fast as the ex- 
cavation advances. The descent of the wall, by 
its own weight, renders it altogether unnecessary 
to use stays or props to prevent the earth from 
caving in. The circular wall does that part of 
the work completely; on the principle of the 
arch, the more it is compressed the more firmly 
it resists the pressure ; besides, as it con- 



SPADE, SHOVEL, PICK AND TROWEL. 201 

tinually descends by its own weight, an im- 
mensity of time and trouble is saved to the 
masons, who remain constantly at work on the 
top of the wall, which is kept on a level, or 
nearly so, with the surrounding surface. 

The first object encountered by the pick and 
the spade, was a layer of black earth, about six 
inches in thickness, which the shovels soon got 
rid of. Then came a stratum of fine sand two 
feet thick ; this was carefully piled away as it was 
to form the core or interior mould of the can- 
non. Then appeared a bed of white clay, pretty 
stiff and somewhat resembling English marl j 
this bed was fully four feet thick. Then the 
clashing point of the pick struck fire against 
the solid stony formation of the hill, a kind of 
dry, hard flinty rock, formed of petrified shells. 
Here, the pit being now six feet and a half 
deep, the masonry commenced, and Murphy's 
happy thought was put into execution. 

At the bottom of the well, they constructed a 
kind of disc, shaped somewhat like a quoit, 
sixty feet in diameter, more than a foot in thick- 
ness, formed of strong oaken planks, riveted, 
bolted, and screwed together, so as to be ren- 
dered as solid a mass as human skill could make 
it. In its centre it had a hole 21 feet wide, 



202 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

corresponding to the external diameter of the 
Columbiad. This disc supported the first layers 
of the stone wall, the stones of which were to 
be held together by hydraulic cement, with in- 
flexible solidity. The masons then built up the 
wall till it was flush with the summit of the 
hill, and the miners found themselves working 
in a pit twenty-one feet in diameter. 

As soon as the wall was considered perfectly 
solid and ^^ all of a piece," as it were, through 
the hydraulic cement, the miners went to work 
at the rock under the disc itself, taking great 
care to support it here and there by solid iron 
studs of extreme solidity. Whenever they had 
sunk the pit a clear foot in depth, they removed 
these studs, which were so constructed that they 
could be readily knocked away. The disc sank 
by degrees, and with it the circular pile of 
masonry, at the upper portion of which the 
men were kept continually at work — not too 
closely, however, to forget leaving occasional 
vents for the future escape of the gases during 
the operation of casting. 

This kind of work, of course, required from 
the men extreme skill and the most wake- 
ful attention. The most dangerous part was 
knocking away the studs, and for the first month 




THE WORK PROfTRKSSF,]) WiTIi (IHKA'T HKWULARITY, 



SPADE, SHOVEL, PICK AND TROWEL. 203 

the loss of legs or arms was most unpleasantly 
frequent. But being very intelligent men, and 
perfectly submissive to Barbican' s and Murphy's 
orders, by degrees they learned to avoid acci- 
dents. Like coal miners, they left very thick 
pillars standing, on the top of which an im- 
mense number of the studs supported the disc ; 
another immense number of studs rested on 
other pillars a few inches lower ; the first set 
being removed, the disc sank to the second set, 
which easily supported it, whilst the first set 
were being prepared to do the same duty in 
their turn. The ardor of the men never re- 
laxed a moment, night or day. Though they 
were so far south, the mean average of the 
thermometer stood no higher than 56° Fahren- 
heit, a temperature very favorable for work. 
During the night, the white sheets of electric 
light that blazed all over the hill, the ringing 
of the picks against the flinty rock, the puffing 
and whirring of the engines, the volumes of 
smoke continually rising from the summit, turned 
Stony Hill into a diminutive Vesuvius, and 
would have frightened the Indians more than 
all the De Leons, Narvaezes, Jacksons, or Gaineses, 
that ever invaded Florida. 

The work in the mean time progressed with 



\ 

204 T/fE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

great regularity. Immense derrick cranes, worked 
by steam, did all the hard labor. Some of them 
supplied the masons with the smaller stones, 
some laid the great blocks, whilst others re- 
moved from the mouth of the well all the 
debris as fast as it was sent up by the miners. 
Unexpected obstacles gave very little trouble ; 
all difficulties had been foreseen, and were 
therefore readily met and conquered. 

At the end of the first month, the averaged 
amount of work was accomplished, the pit hav- 
ing reached a depth of a little more than 112 
feet. By the middle of January this depth was 
doubled, and it was tripled on the 19th of 
February. 

But about this time the miners began to have 
trouble with some subterranean springs of water 
which had managed to trickle through from the 
surface. They were obliged to employ pumps 
of great power and machines worked by com- 
pressed air, in order to get at the orifices and 
stop them up with concrete, as the seams of a 
ship are caulked with oakum when she springs a 
leak. At last, those vexatious currents were mas- 
tered, but not before they had done serious 
damage. They had washed away some of the 
sandy veins of the rocks, so that the disc sunk 



SPADE, SHOVEL, PICK AND TROWEL. 205 

unevenly, and in fact partially caved in. Just 
imagine the tremendous force and weight of this 
pile of solid masonry 300 feet in height. Three 
weeks fully were consumed in staying and prop- 
ping the sides of the opening and in under- 
pinning the disc in order to restore it to its 
former state of solidity. By that time, thanks 
to Barbican ^s fertility of invention, fully seconded 
by an extraordinary skill in managing his power- 
ful machinery, the enormous pile, for a while 
compromised, recovered its perfect perpendicu- 
larity, and the work could go on as regularly 
as before. 

Henceforward, no new incident arrested the 
progress of the work — in fact, it marched on 
now at such an accelerated pace as to be fin- 
ished on the loth of June, considerably more 
than a month before the term appointed by 
Barbican, who always left sufficient margin in his 
calculations for delays that might turn up though 
they could not possibly be seen at the time. 
At six o'clock on the evening of that day, the 
pit, completely faced with its revetment of 
masonry, had reached the depth of nine hun- 
dred feet. At the bottom, the pile rested on 
solid block stone work thirty feet in thickness ; 
at the top, its surface was exactly flush with the 



206 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

summit of the hill. Barbican and the other 
members of the Gun Club warmly congratulated 
Murphy on the unexampled rapidity with which 
he had so successfully accomplished his Cyclo- 
pean task. 

During the whole time, Barbican had never 
left Stony Hill for a moment — not that he im- 
agined that the work could not advance without 
him — but because he wished to witness every 
portion of its progress with his own eyes. He 
particularly made it his especial care to see after 
the health and comfort of the numerous work- 
men, who had cut themselves away, as it were, 
from the world at his instigation, and for whose 
safety he therefore considered himself in a great 
mieasure responsible. His sanitary precautions 
were simply perfect. His quick eye in an in- 
stant perceived a drooping man, who was im- 
mediately sent to the hospital, where he soon 
recovered, because the treatment was kind and 
intelligent, and because the disorder had been 
arrested before it had made much headway. 

Barbican's countrymen in general, unfortu- 
nately, have not the reputation of being over 
attentive to such details. In their regard for 
the rights of humanity, they sometimes forget 
the rights of man. In the roaring onward 



SPADE, SHOVEL, PICK AND TROWEL. 207 

march of the triumphant majority, who, they 
ask, can find time to pick up the individual 
unfortunate enough to faint on the way ? 

But Barbican did not believe in these unholy 
principles, and he showed it in all his actions. 
At war, he had tried to put an end to war by 
destroying the greatest number of his enemies in 
the shortest possible time. Even then, his ex- 
perimental researches in gunnery had been con- 
tinually inspired by the idea of rendering guns 
at last so terrific in their discharges that even 
the most bellicose of nations would shudder at 
the idea of engaging in a war. His scientific 
enthusiasm, combined with his extraordinary prac- 
tical skill, had often led him into visionary un- 
dertakings, but his profound science had taught 
him that in this world there is really nothing 
more valuable than human life. Therefore, thanks 
to his care, his intelligence, his promptness in 
difficult cases, his extraordinary sagacity, and par- 
ticularly to his true humanity by which he 
secured a wonderful influence over his men, the 
average of accidents attendant on the sinking of 
the shaft, fell short of even the average of 
France, where only one accident occurs for 
every 200,000 francs spent in hazardous opera- 
tions. 



CHAPTER XV. 



THE CASTING. 



Sinking the pit had not been the only work 
done at Stony Hill during these eight months ; 
the preparations preliminary to the casting had 
been carried on simultaneously with extreme 
rapidity. A stranger arriving at the place, 
would have been very much surprised at the 
scene presented to his view. 

At a distance of six hundred yards from the 
pit, and forming a regular circle around it, 
twelve hundred fire brick furnaces or cupolas 
had been erected, each six feet wide, and sepa- 
rated from each other by an interval of three 
feet. The circumference of the circle was there- 
fore more than two miles in length. All the 
furnaces were constructed on the same plan ; 
and the immense four cornered chimneys, all 
precisely the same height, and all precisely the 
same distance apart, produced an effect which, 
according to Marston, who admired exceedingly 
the whole arrangement, *^ if not strangely beauti- 
ful was at least beautifully strange.'* 
(208) 



THE CASTING, 209 

The reader may perhaps remember that the 
committee had decided, at the third session, to 
employ cast iron for the Columbiad. In fact 
this metal, when of the kind called the grey 
pig, is remarkable for its tenacity, ductility and 
softness ; it is easily cast and readily bored ; 
and when fused . in a coal furnace, it is a very 
superior material for cannons, steam cylinders, 
hydraulic presses, and for all kinds of machinery 
where great powers of resistance are indispensable. 

But metal melted only once, is seldom homo- 
geneous ; it requires a second fusion to purify 
and refine it, by ridding it entirely of slag and 
its other earthly impurities. Accordingly, the 
ore roasted in the great iron regions of central 
and southeastern Pennsylvania, before being sent 
to Tampa, had been carefully smelted in the 
blast furnaces of the Cold Spring Iron Works, 
where combining with charcoal and silicium, 
raised to a very high temperature, it had formed 
the variety called cast iron No. i,* or grey pig. 

To transport 136 million pounds of cast iron 

to Tampa was no slight undertaking, but the 

Cold Spring Company were equal to the task. 

On the third of April, a fleet of no less than 

68 full rigged ships, each at least looo tons 

burden, laden with the metal, started from New 
14 



210 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

York, passed Sandy Hook, turned south, doubled 
stormy Hatteras safely, entered Florida Strait, 
passed within sight of Key West city, where 
they were hailed with the cheers of at least 
5000 throats, and then skirting the west coast 
of Florida, soon came in sight of the entrance 
to Tampa Bay. On the tenth of May they 
began unloading at the Stony Hill Railroad 
wharf, and by the middle of the following 
month the enormous mass of metal had safely 
reached its destination. 

It is easy to understand that the 1200 furnaces 
were none too many to melt simultaneously these 
68,000 tons of metal. Each of them could hold 
about 114,000 pounds of melted iron ; they had 
been constructed on the very same plan as the 
cupolas which Rodman had employed when 
casting his columbiads. That is to say, they 
were trapezoidal in shape, with the roof coming 
down very low ; the fire and the chimneys being 
at different ends, the heat was equally distributed 
throughout the whole extent. Built of the best 
Philadelphia fire bricks, these furnaces consisted 
principally of a grate to burn the coal and a 
'^ hearth" on which the iron to be melted was 
deposited in bars. The hearth, not horizontal 
but sloping at an angle of 25 degrees, allowed 



THE CASTING 211 

the fused metal to flow into troughs conveniently 
placed for its reception j from these it was con- 
veyed by twelve hundred converging trenches 
directly towards the central pit. 

The morning after all the work attending the 
sinking of the well and its solid stone lining 
had been completed, Barbican proceeded to the 
formation of what was to be the *' core'* of 
the Columbiad. His idea was to erect in the 
middle of the pit, and in a direct line with its 
axis, a solid cylinder nine hundred feet high, 
and nine feet wide, the dimensions of the gun's 
interior. This cylinder consisted of a stiff yel- 
low clay mixed with sand and held firmly 
together by hay and straw. The interval be- 
tween it and the masonry was to be filled by 
the melted metal, which would thus form the 
walls or sides of the Columbiad, six feet in 
thickness. To be kept perfectly vertical, it had 
to be strengthened by iron braces, and propped 
by cross pieces firmly imbedded in the masonry. 
After the casting, these cross pieces, forming 
as they did a portion of the solid metal, would, 
of course, do no harm to the gun. 

On the eighth of July the core was pro- 
nounced '^ all right," and the casting was to 
take place on the tenth. 



212 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

*^ What a grand and impressive sight this cast- 
ing must afford to all present !*' said Secretary 
Marston to President Barbican, on the morning 
of the ninth. '* The Tampa people are de- 
lighted that it did not take place on the fourth 
of July, last week, as they will now have two 
holidays instead of one." 

^' What are you talking about, Marston ?'* re- 
plied Barbican. ** We shall have no holiday 
here !" 

'^ How ?. Are not the gates to be thrown 
open to every one that wants to see the mag- 
nificent sight ?'* asked the Secretary. 

** I should never think of such a thing, Mars- 
ton,*' .replied the President. '* Casting our 
Columbiad will be a very delicate, not to say 
a very dangerous, operation, and I should prefer 
to have it done in private. When the projec- 
tile is shot off, holiday as much as you chose, 
but till then, no.'' 

Barbican was perfectly right. The operation 
might easily present unforeseen dangers and diffi- 
culties towards the successful grappling with 
which a great crowd of strangers should cer- 
tainly prove an obstacle. He himself also should 
have perfect liberty to move about from point 
to point. Nobody, therefore, was admitted 



THE CASTING. 213 

within the enclosure except a delegation of the 
Gun Club, which had come over the railroad 
early on the morning of the tenth, from Tampa, 
by the 4.30 train. 

It consisted of Elphinstone, Morgan, our old 
friends Billsby the brave, Tom Hunter and 
Colonel Bloomsbury, and of several others who 
had played a very active and successful part 
in the financial operations of the great un- 
dertaking. Marston was their guide, and as 
it was not yet six o'clock, he made the 
most of the occasion. He allowed them to 
pass no detail unnoticed or misunderstood. He 
took them everywhere ; to the store houses, the 
workshops, the machines ; he had them let down 
by ^^ man-engines'* to the bottom of the pit; 
he even compelled them to make the *^ grand 
tour" of the 1200 furnaces, assuring them that 
they could do it in half an hour at a brisk 
pace. Before they were half through, some of 
them felt like giving up the ghost, but most 
of them persevered manfully. They were pro- 
tected from the burning rays of a July sun by 
the dense volumes of black smoke issuing from 
the immense circle of 1200 chimneys, and over- 
spreading the inclosed area like a huge awning. 

At noon precisely, the casting was to take 



214 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

place. The previous evening, each furnace had 
been supplied with 114,000 pounds of pig iron 
in bars, which were piled in layers alternately 
crossing each other, so as' to be more readily 
reached by the heat. Since early in the morn- 
ing, the 1200 chimneys had been vomiting forth 
thick smoke in torrents, and the earth sensibly 
quivered from the roaring of the flames. As 
many pounds of metal as were to be melted, so 
many pounds of coal were to be burned. Judge, 
therefore, if the smoke must have been dense, 
which was produced by 68,000 tons of coal, all 
burning together and at a comparatively short 
distance apart. 

Towards 11 o'clock, the roaring of the flames 
resembled the rumbling of an earthquake near 
at hand. But it was not able to drown the 
shrill whir of the powerful fans forcing the 
hot air with its oxygen in continuous streams 
on to the masses of incandescent metal. The 
heat became intolerable, but the success of the 
casting depended altogether on the rapidity of 
the operation. The signal was to be given by 
a cannon, and, at the appointed instant, every 
furnace was to open and give discharge to its 
fiery contents immediately and completely. 

Every arrangement being now perfected, over- 



THE CASTING. 215 

seers and workmen awaited the appointed 
moment with an impatience mingled with emo- 
tion. Nobody had been allowed to remain in 
the central enclosure, and every foreman stood 
at his post, beside his trough and at the head 
of his trench. Barbican and his colleagues, 
outside on a little eminence, stood behind the 
cannon that was to be discharged at the engi- 
neer's signal. 

A few minutes before 12, the first drops of 
the metal began to trickle down the inclined 
hearths ; by degrees the troughs began to fill ; 
when they were quite full, the white hot, hiss- 
ing liquid was allowed to stand a few instants, 
so as to permit any impurities still remaining 
in it to come to the surface as scum. 

A great bell struck noon ; at the last stroke 
the report of the cannon roared out the signal. 
Instantly the 1200 trough doors flew open, and 
1200 blazing torrents, billowing, hissing, and 
sparkling like serpents of living fire, shot down 
the trenches towards the central pit. There, 
forming a mighty cataract, they plunged, with 
deafening uproar, into an abyss nine hundred 
feet deep. It was an exciting and magnificent 
spectacle. The earth shook with the concussion, 
as these pillars of moltea iron, dashing through 



216 - THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

whirlwinds of smoke and dust, broke against 
the core and fell in great fragments around its 
base, rapidly volatilising its moisture as they 
rose, and sending it out in floods of steam, 
shrieking, glowing, reeking through the vents 
that had been left in the masonry. Immense 
clouds, formed of smoke, steam, dust and gases, 
streamed up vertically from the pit, whirling 
their spiral volumes as they rapidly ascended, 
and forming themselves into a shape somewhat 
resembling that of an enormous tree half a mile 
in height. A traveller, 20 or 30 miles away, 
seeing this gigantic pillar, and reminded of 
Vesuvius, would probably suppose that a new 
Jorullo had sprung up in Florida. Yet it was 
neither an eruption, nor an earthquake, nor a 
waterspout, nor a whirlwind, nor any of those 
terrible commotions that nature, ordinarily so 
quiet, is sometimes capable of producing. No ! 
It was man alone that had sent up those blood- 
red clouds worthy of a burning forest, that 
tower of blazing fire seldom seen on the sum- 
mit of Etna ; it was he that had unchained 
those hollow rumblings terrific as those pre- 
saging the earthquake shock, and that ear- 
splitting, unearthly roar loud as a shrieking 
tempest ; it was his feeble hand that had pre- 



THE CASTING, 217 

cipitated into a yawning chasm, which he him- 
self had previously dug out, a whole Niagara of 
tearing, raging, scintillating, blazing, liquid 
metal ! 



CHAPTER XVI. 



THE BIG GUN. 



Had the casting succeeded ? This question 
for the present could be answered only by- 
conjectures, though there was every reason to 
hope for the best, as the entire mass of melted 
metal had been completely absorbed in the 
mould. There was no certainty however on the 
subject, and a good many days should still 
elapse before a decided answer either way could 
be obtained. 

If Rodman's gun of 160,000 pounds took no 
less than fifteen days to cool, how long might 
the monstrous Columbiad, wreathed in whirl- 
v/inds of vapor and defended by her intense 
heat, succeed in keeping herself hidden from 
the gaze of her ardent admirers ? That was 
a question of difficult calculation. 

It was a severe test to the Gun Club men's 

patience. But there was absolutely no help for 

it. On July 26th, 15 days after the casting, 

the clouds of black smoke still rose apparently 

as dense as ever, and the soil within a circle 
(218) 



THE BIG GUN. 219 

of two hundred feet from the pit was as hot as 
cooling lava. Marston, the rashest of men, as 
well as the most curious, lost several pairs of 
shoes and boots by approaching too near. In- 
deed, his devotion to science almost cost him 
his life one day, a sudden change in the wind 
enveloping him in a cloud of sulphurous smoke 
that nearly smothered him. 

The days slipped slowly away one by one. 
The time could be counted even by weeks, still 
the monstrous cylinder gave no sign, whatever, 
of cooling, and was as difficult as ever of ap- 
proach. The Gun Club men, completely power- 
less to mend matters, fidgeted and fumed, 
chafed and raved, in a state of impatience al- 
together impossible to describe. Marston almost 
exploded under the pressure. 

** Here we are at the tenth of August !" he 
exclaimed one day to a crowd of grumbling 
and disgusted Club men. *^ Less than four 
months from the first of December ! And 
what a lot of work is yet to be done ! Clear 
out the core, adjust the calibre, lodge the pow- 
der, introduce the projectile ! We shall never 
be ready ! You can't even go near the darned 
thing ! I burned another pair of boots off 
this morning !'* 



220 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

Nobody attempted to calm the impetuous Sec- 
retary. In the present state of general irrita- 
tion he was regarded as a public benefactor, on 
the principle of the safety valve. Barbican 
alone never said a word ; yet even his silence 
betrayed a secret impatience. To find himself 
so persistently encountered by an obstacle 
that time alone could overcome, and not a par- 
ticle of that precious time to be spared — this 
was indeed hard to be borne by a man whose 
resources were limited only by the impossible. 

In another day or two, however, careful ob- 
servations noted a decided change in the tem- 
perature of the soil. Towards the middle of 
the month the ascending vapors had visibly 
diminished both in rapidity of motion and 
in density of column. A few days more, and 
they exhaled only a little whitish moisture, the 
last breath of the dying monster shut up in his 
stone coffin. By degrees the succussions of the 
soil became less sensible, and the circle of heat 
contracted its radius. The impatient spectators, 
standing around in a circle, approached each 
other little by little. One day they gained as 
much as twelve feet, the next day twenty-four, 
and on the 2 2d of August, Barbican, his col- 
leagues, and the engineer Murphy, were able 



THE BIG GUN, 221 

to keep their place on the warm sheet of cast 
iron that had overflowed the summit of Stony 
Hill. Marston had hardly a sole left to his 
boots, but he easily consoled himself for his 
loss by saying that in such a spot you could 
not get cold in the feet if you tried. Barbi- 
can said nothing, but he heaved a deep sigh 
of profound satisfaction. 

That very day the works were at once re- 
sumed. The first thing to do being to clear 
out the core, pick, shovel, spade, and boring 
tools were put into instant and incessant appli- 
cation. The clay and sand, under the action 
of the heat, had acquired an extreme hardness, 
but, by means of their powerful machines, the 
workmen soon pierced it, cracked it, and broke 
it into pieces small enough to be hoisted up 
in enormous iron buckets, and rapidly carried 
off on trucks running night and day on a tram- 
way that started from the very mouth of the 
pit. The work now progressed with wonderful 
rapidity, deriving new energy from its previous 
forced inaction, like a mighty river temporarily 
restrained by some obstacle — not to mention 
the inspiring effect of Barbican's incessant and 
ubiquitous activity, which the promise of doubling 
the men's wages had now rendered absolutely 



222 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

irresistible. No wonder then if by September 
3d, every trace of the core had disappeared 
from the interior of the Columbiad. 

Then commenced the work of smoothing its 
internal sides and giving them the proper cali- 
bre. The machines proper for the purpose, 
being made beforehand, were installed without 
delay ; circular cutting tools of immense power 
attacked the roughnesses and inequalities of 
the cast, and in a few weeks the interior sur- 
face, made perfectly smooth and cylindrical, 
shone with the brightness of a silver reflector. 

At last, on the 2 2d of September, less than 
a year since Barbican* s famous communication, 
the enormous engine, accurately calibred, and 
perfectly vertical, as proved by the rigidest 
tests, was pronounced ready to do its work. 
Now if the Moon would only prove as punctual 
— but about her ability to be up to time, nobody, 
of course, entertained the least doubt. 

Marston's joy at the result , was actually be- 
yond expression. That day, just as his friends, 
having come up from one of their last visits to 
the bottom of the cannon, were standing around 
its edge, he insisted on ^^ boring them,'* as he 
said, ** with a little extempore speech in honor 
of the occasion." There was surely no great 



THE BIG GUN. 223 

harm in this, but as he had the ugly and not 
uncommon trick of springing backwards and 
forwards whilst under the impulse of his ora- 
torical furor, a most deplorable accident was 
very near being the- result. As long as he 
kept still, all was well ; the edge of the pit 
was a lovely spot whence to address an audi- 
ence, the occasion was exciting, and every word 
told. But the fit soon came on him ; he 
could not begin his sentences without running 
backwards, and to finish them he had to run 
forwards. The audience was spell-bound under 
the stream of his burning eloquence, and not 
one saw the danger — not one but Barbican, 
who was fire proof against poetry, and no more 
minded the gilded phrases of oratory than so 
many puffs of a locomotive. Just as his friend, 
having run back a few yards while delivering 
the first half of a particularly long and thrilling 
sentence, was racing forward to finish it, with 
a momentum towards the edge of the pit that 
would certainly have sent him over, Barbican 
grasped him like a vice, and by his immense 
physical strength, easily saved this modern Cur- 
tius from a frightful death in the profound 
depths of the mighty Columbiad. 

The cannon being finished, the news was im- 



224 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

mediately telegraphed all over the Union, and, 
of course, Captain McNichoU was the first to 
hear of it. Having satisfied himself that he 
had lost his wager, he immediately sent Bar- 
bican, in payment, a bill of exchange drawn 
by Drexel & Co., and on the ist of October 
the President of the Gun Club had the gratifi- 
cation of writing on the receipt column of his 
cash book the sum of two thousand dollars. 
The Captain^s fury was so great that it actually 
made him sick — at least that was the way his 
friends accounted for a few days* confinement 
to his room. However, as there were still three 
other wagers to be decided, of 3, 4, and 5 
thousand dollars respectively, and as he was 
pretty certain of winning two of them, the affair, 
looked at financially, was not unpromising. But 
the financial aspect of the question gave the 
Captain the least trouble. It was the wonder- 
ful success of his rival, in casting a cannon 
which a plate armor of sixty feet thick would be 
incapable of resisting, that now galled him to 
the quick, and rendered him a perfectly misera- 
ble m.an. (We forgot to mention that long 
before this, the Captain had ordered his first 
wager to be paid, as soon as he saw that from 
the state of public feeling the success of the 



THE BIG GUN. 225 

subscription was assured. The Captain was a 
strictly honorable man ; like all great geniuses, 
he was, of course, rather cranky and stubborn, 
but there was not a particle of trickery in his 
composition.) 

On the 23d of September, the gates of the 
enclosure at Stony Hill were thrown open to the 
public, and you can hardly imagine what crowds 
of visitors immediately availed themselves of the 
opportunity to visit the great curiosity. 

In fact visitors from all parts of the Union, 
and even from Europe, Japan, China, and other 
civilized quarters of the world, had been flocking 
into Tampa ever since the beginning of the travel- 
ling season. Instead of passing the summer on 
the Continent, or at Newport, or at Cape May, 
or at Saratoga, or the Yosemite Valley, or amid 
the grand scenery of the heart of the Rocky 
Mountains, the fashionable American world had 
determined to devote it to a sight of the won- 
ders going on at Stony Hill. The working 
classes strictly followed suit as far as they could, 
which was eminently right and proper in a coun- 
try where ^^ one man is as good as another.'* 
The great Pennsylvania Railroad organized *' ex- 
cursion trains*' from all the principal cities of the 

North, which took you to '* Tampa and back," 
IS 



226 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

with the privilege of remaining over at any- 
place of interest on the route, tickets good for 
a month — all for 5 dollars, a sum any good man 
in the United States can earn in two days. As 
a matter of course, this great influx of strangers 
had greatly increased the size of Tampa. From 
less than 800, the population had risen in less 
than a year to nearly 50,000 souls. The city- 
no longer knew itself. Having surrounded Fort 
Brooke in a network of streets, it began extend- 
ing itself along the tongue of land that sepa- 
rates the two divisions of Tampa Bay. Block 
after block, square after square, of good sub- 
stantial dwellings, now covered what only a few 
months before had been a mere sandy waste, or 
a marsh croaking with bullfrogs. Churches and 
schools had sprung up like magic, and you may 
be sure that such indispensable elements of the 
success of every new American settlement as 
newspaper offices and drinking ^^ saloons,'* were 
to be found in gratifying abundance. In less 
than a year, the extent of the city was decupled. 
This progress was wonderful even in America, 
and beat out Chicago, who only quadruples 
herself every ten years. 

Everybody knows that the American, or Yankee 
as he is called in Europe, is a natural born 




TAMPA AFTER THE US^DERTAKISG. 



THE BIG GUN. 227 

trader. Wherever fortune throws him, on the 
ice of the Arctic regions, or under the burning 
sun of the torrid zone, his instinctive talent for 
business is at once called into play. To the 
grand and beautiful in nature he is as impres- 
sionable as any one else, but if there is '* any 
money in it'* his nose of unerring keenness is 
the first to smell it out. Somebody said with 
more truth than poetry that if a Yankee was 
shipwrecked on a South Sea island, the very 
next morning you would find him selling cotton 
suspenders to the natives. It is in fact to this 
irrepressible instinct of looking at everything 
with the practical eye of utility, that his great 
country, the envy of the world, is indebted for 
her wide spread activity, the abundance of her 
resources, and her unexampled prosperity. 

It was just the same at Tampa. Many a man 
of means from Baltimore or Boston, visiting 
Florida with the sole desire of witnessing the 
curious operations of the Gun . Club, finding 
himself in the midst of those luxuriant savannahs, 
so suitable for rice and the sugar cane, of those 
flourishing cotton fields and orange groves, of 
those avenues of live oaks and olive trees draped 
in Spanish moss, of those Florentine gardens 
where the fig, the date, the palm, the banana, 



228 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

the citron, and the pomegranate flourish in the 
open air, of those woods and streams so stocked 
with game as to make Florida the sportsman's 
paradise, of those virgin forests untouched by 
axe, so suggestive of millions to be made by 
the saw-mill and lumber trade, but, above all, 
charmed by the balmy incense-breathing climate 
not surpassed by that of the lovely Riviera — I 
say, many a Northern man of means, who had 
come so far South out of mere motives of curi- 
osity, saw such unexpected advantages presented 
by a residence there that he never went back, 
except to return with his family. Many a 
mechanic too from New York or Philadelphia, 
where food is dear, fuel scarce and rent high, 
the winter icy and the summer roasting, finding 
food to be so plentiful in Tampa as almost to 
be had for the asking, coal to be absolutely 
useless, wood in superabundance, no winters, 
mild summers, plenty of work to be had the 
whole year round and no working days spoiled 
by the weather — many a mechanic, I repeat, 
concluding at once to stay where he was, for- 
feited his *' excursion*' ticket privilege of re- 
turning, and sent for his wife and children as 
soon as he had earned money enough to pay 
their passage. The great fleet laden with pig 



THE BIG GUN. 229 

iron was only the precursor of others, not so 
numerous, it is true, but more frequent, and 
every day increasing in importance. Very soon 
you could see vessels of all shapes, sizes, and 
descriptions, loading and unloading along wharves 
miles in length. Great shipping houses lined 
the water's edge ; behind them stood immense 
store houses belonging to the agents of the 
chief Northern firms ; not far off, brokers of 
every staple article of merchandise displayed 
their abundant wares ; in short, Tampa, where a 
few months ago an oyster smack had been an 
object of the curiosity, and the monthly arrival 
of the government cutter with dispatches for 
Fort Brooke had been an event of absorbing 
interest, was now declared a port of entry, and 
an appropriation was made in Congress for the 
erection of a Tampa Custom House and a 
Tampa Bonded Warehouse, one in the Greek 
style of architecture, the other in the ornate 
modern style, with a French roof, each to cost 
one million of dollars. 

The facilities for reaching the now famous 
city, by water and by land, had increased in 
a similar ratio. You could not turn your eyes 
in any direction along the busy wharves without 
being encountered by immense posters display- 



230 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

ing the respective merits of Murray's Line, and 
Black Star Line, from New York ; Clyde Line, 
and Southern Steamship Line, from Philadelphia ; 
Boyce's Line, from Baltimore ; besides other 
lines of steamers from New Orleans and Ha- 
vana. The New York Journal of Commerce, 
the great business man's paper, added Tampa 
to the list of the other important seaports of 
which the arrivals and departures were to be 
chronicled every day. 

The New York Tribune, generally pretty good 
authority on matters of fact, was all wrong 
when it asserted so positively that the Gulf Rail- 
road would not be finished for many years to 
come. Starting from Fernandina, an interest- 
ing old town with one of the finest harbors on 
the east coast, this railroad had been intended 
to cross the peninsula in a southwesterly direc- 
tion and to terminate at Cedar Keys on the 
Gulf of Mexico. But after struggling through 
the swamps for forty or fifty miles until it 
reached Baldwin, there it had stuck fast, and 
so continued for several years. Then it slowly 
crawled along as far as Waldo, which was the 
point, as may be recollected, that Barbican had 
struggled so earnestly but so ineffectually to 
unite with Tampa. 




'I.Liti^frru (h-1. 



EJjns^rJt,£jitj. 



Scene of the Operation^. 



THE BIG GUN. 231 

But the influx of Northern capital consequent 
on the Stony Hill enterprise, soon changed this 
state of things. Not only was the railroad com- 
pleted as far as Cedar Keys, but also the latter 
town was connected with Tampa by a branch 
constructed along the low marshy Gulf coast at 
great trouble and expense. Barbican had made 
the company a present of the drawings of his 
route, strongly recommending it as being higher 
and healthier, more picturesque and fertile, be- 
sides being shorter and less expensive. But 
Barbican, though a great artillerist, was unfortu- 
nately only a Baltimore man, and no mere Balti- 
more man could by any possibility teach a Boston 
man, as the President of the Gulf Raib^oad Com- 
pany prided himself upon being. 

For, outside of Boston, as you must know, 
everything in the United States is provincial ; 
literature, fashion, society, at best only second 
rate ; all the boys and girls in the Union learn 
their lessons out of Boston newspapers, Boston 
magazines, and Boston books ; the Revolu- 
tionary War began and ended within sight of 
Bunker Hill ; the Boston people single handed 
had licked the British in 1S12 ; aided a little 
by some other New Englanders, they had 
put down the great rebellion of '61 ; Faneuil 



232 7 HE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

Hall, *' the cradle of American Liberty/' was 
the only place where the ^* Centennial*' should 
be celebrated ; her municipal system was un- 
equalled ; her fire department was simply per- 
fect ; no act of cruel bigotry had ever disgraced 
her lofty minded and enlightened people ; her 
men were all corresponding members of learned 
societies, and her women read so much that 
they all wore eye glasses ; her public schools 
produced the profoundest of scholars and the 
most virtuous of citizens. Such, at least, was 
the Nicene Creed repeated every Sunday by 
every good Bostonian. The President of the 
Gulf Railroad happened to be an extra good 
Bostonian. A Baltimorian to dictate to him ? 
Never ! Of course he had his way ; the branch 
followed the worst possible route, because a 
Baltimorian had pointed out the best possible 
one. What matter if it cost -the company an 
additional million of dollars and five thousand 
poor Irish laborers their lives ? A grand moral 
principle had been successfully vindicated. If 
Boston is not to have her way, the world is 
not worth living in ! 

By the completion of the branch railroad to 
Cedar Keys, and of another, much smaller, con- 
necting Fernandina with Brunswick, passing near 



THE BIG GUN, 233 

i 

the famous Okeefinokee Swamp, the home of 
millions of alligators, frogs, lizards and cranes, 
Tampa was put in direct and constant commu- 
nication with all the great Northern cities. 

As may be readily supposed, this flourishing 
state of things in Florida was looked on with 
no friendly eye by the inhabitants of southern 
Texas. Every gain accruing to the peninsula 
in consequence of the grand experiment, they 
considered as so much lost by themselves. Those 
ships, those railroads, those emigrants, those 
capitalists, all the developments of prosperity at- 
tending in their train, by right belonged to 
southern Texas, and would have been hers too, 
only for the absurd preference of the crazy fool 
Barbican for that miserable one-horse, slink of a 
place called Tampa. In the meantime, they fell 
back for consolation on the awful prophecy 
still confidently uttered by their disappointed 
commissioners ; and every morning the Texans 
opened their newspapers with the pious hope 
of feasting their eyes on something like the 
following, printed in the largest and most start- 
ling type : 



234 the baltimore gun club, 

Astounding Intelligence ! 
The Great Columbiad Burst ! ! 
3000 people killed ! ! ! 
We stop the press to announce that 
Barbican and the other Club Men have been 
blown off the face of the earth ! 
Their bodies cannot be found ! ! 
Intense excitement, etc., etc., etc. ! ! ! 
N. B. — We shall issue extras every ten min- 
utes, giving our readers the latest and most in- 
teresting details regarding this 

Truly terrific but not unexpected 
catastrophe ! ! ! 1 

Tampa troubled herself very little about either 
the ill will or the good will of the Texans. 
But though her commercial activity and her in- 
dustrial prosperity were now in full blast, she 
was not so wholly engrossed in them as to for- 
get what had given birth to them both. Quite 
the contrary. The slightest detail of the Gun 
Club's operations interested her keenly. Not 
a delve with a spade, a stroke with a hammer, 
or a chop with an axe, escaped her notice. 
The coming and going between Tampa and 
Stony Hill was incessant night and day ; the 
trains could not accommodate half the visitors ; 



THE BIG GUN. - 235 

even the vehicles were far from meeting the 
general demand ; and the roads were black with 
people, all facing in one direction, like pilgrims 
bound for some holy shrine. 

It was easy to foresee that on the day when 
the grand experiment was to be finally made, 
the spectators could be counted by millions. 
So many strangers now began to arrive that for 
several months the Floridian peninsula must 
have been the great centre towards which the 
prow of every vessel in every sea was turned. 

Up to this time, it must be acknowledged, 
the strangers who had expected to see much 
had in reality seen very little. Many had 
come early, expecting to witness the magnifi- 
cent spectacle of the casting. The sight of 
nothing but smoke was a sad disappointment 
to their hungry eyes, for Barbican, as we al- 
ready know, had turned a deaf ear on their 
remonstrances and would allow nobody's presence 
at such a dangerous operation. . The conse- 
quence of course was grumbling, dissatisfaction, 
irritation ; such epithets as *^ too darned stuck 
up," ** big dog of the tanyard,'* *^ bumptious,'* 
were circulated from mouth to mouth, though 
in under tones ; in fact, there came very near 
being a serious riot around the fence on the 



236 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

day of the casting. Still, as previously men- 
tioned, Barbican even on that day had shown 
himself inexorable as fate. 

But the labors in the interior of the Colum- 
biad once completed, the face of things was 
immediately changed ; the gates were thrown 
open ; every one was allowed full opportunity 
to gratify his curiosity ; only, Barbican, like 
the eminently practical business man that he 
was, had determined to make the public enthu- 
siasm contribute considerably towards the success 
of the enterprise. 

To get a glimpse at all af the immense Co- 
lumbiad was something to be proud of, but to 
descend down into its yawning caverns nine hun- 
dred feet deep — that was a sight worth all the 
trouble of going there to see. Everybody 
wanted to be the first to go below. Neat car- 
riages with cushioned seats, and bars all round 
high enough to prevent all danger, were sus- 
pended by great ropes made of many strands of 
iron wire, and let down and drawn up by great 
revolving drums working day and night at the 
mouth of the pit. Even the timidest travellers, 
not excluding the women and children, could 
not resist the desire of seeing the mysterious 
wonders of the colossal cannon. The sensation 



ThjE BIG GUN. 237 

many allowed to be far and away ahead of that 
produced by a ride down the famous Switch 
Back. The *' excursion*' tickets from the 
Northern cities always included a coupon, giv- 
ing you the right to a descent in the ^' Big 
Gun/* as the people commonly called it. No 
wonder, therefore, if the sight considerably 
swelled the cash receipts of the Club. The 
tariff fixed by Barbican of five dollars for a 
season ticket and one dollar for a single admis- 
sion was readily paid, and, for the two months 
that the gun kept open, the public curiosity 
was so great and incessant that, after paying 
all the extra hands employed for selling tickets 
and attending to the comfort and safety of the 
visitors, a net profit of 500,000 dollars was 
made by the operation, and, what was still bet- 
ter, not a single life was lost, though the regis- 
ters showed an average of more than 10,000 
visitors a day. 

It is almost needless to mention that the first 
regular guests let down into the Columbiad by 
the apparatus of the revolving drum and the 
cars, were the chief members of the Gun Club, 
an honor to which that illustrious body had 
every right. The solemn opening of the gun 
took place on September 25th. A car of honor, 



238 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

of double size, and made especially for the oc- 
casion, waving with the flags of all the known 
countries of the world except England, de- 
scended with President Barbican, Secretary 
Marston, General Morgan, Colonel Bloomsbury, 
Major Elphinstone, Chief Engineer Murphy, 
and several other distinguished members of the 
celebrated Club, about ten altogether, that num- 
ber being about all there was room for. They 
took five minutes to go down, at the rate of 
three feet to a second ; this was rather slow, 
but Barbican had observed that a quicker de- 
scent than this made many people sick. They 
came up, however, in two minutes, and hardly 
felt the motion. They found it pretty hot at 
the bottom of this long metal tube, but they 
were in too good spirits to mind it. A table, 
with covers for ten, had been laid on the solid 
rock that served as a foundation for the Colum- 
biad, and a brilliant electric light made every- 
thing as bright as day. Dishes of exquisite 
cookery and of every variety, seeming to de- 
scend from heaven, arranged themselves before 
each guest, and the best wines of Burgundy 
and Champagne crowned a splendid dinner, that 
was enjoyed heartily by the joyous party nine 
hundred feet below the surface of the earth. 



THE BIG GUN. 239 

As the wines circulated, the laughter became 
merrier and the voices louder ; speeches began 
to be made and toasts to be offered by several 
gentlemen at the same time. They drank to the 
health of everybody and everything appropriate 
to the occasion, beginning of course with the 
President of the United States, and ending with 
the ^* Ladies." They drank to the health of 
the Gun Club, to which Barbican replied in a 
neat speech two minutes long, and Marston by 
a flowery oration which he was finally com- 
pelled to stop only on the assurance that his 
own turn would come by and by. They drank 
the health of the terrestrial globe, our old dear 
mother Earth. But the favorite toast of the 
evening was the Moon ! Every member gave 
her a name of his own : Our Satellite / Queen 
of the Night ! Isis I Astarte / Fhcebe I Arte?7tis / 
Diana ! Luna / Noctiluca / and said something 
apropos to the name, and whatever he said was 
sure to be soon drowned in a tumult of applause. 
The cheers, the laughter, the cries, the accla- 
mations, the rappings on the table and the other 
noises, though nothing extraordinary down there, 
had become by the time they arrived at the mouth 
of the Columbiad, so reverberated, reflected and 
re-echoed by this gigantic speaking trumpet that 



240 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

they sounded like peals of terrific thunder in 
the ears of the vast multitudes assembled on the 
summit of Stony Hill. The unearthly uproar, 
however, no way frightened them, for they con- 
tinued till late in the night, answering cheer 
with cheer, acclamation with acclamation, yell 
with yell, whilst the depths of the mighty forests 
around them rang back responsive echoes, like 
the screams of a gigantic organ. 

This reminds us of Marston, who, his health 
by this time having been drunk with all the 
honors, made a speech in which he actually 
surpassed himself. ^^ It was the proudest 
moment of his life ; he was in a condition that 
emperors might envy ; and he would not change 
places that moment with the mighty emperor of 
all the Russias. No ! Not even though, in the 
very next instant, the mighty Columbiad, loaded, 
primed and discharged, were to sweep him, J. 
T. Marston, dismemembered, comminuted, dis- 
integrated into a million fragments, through the 
vast, the illimitable regions of starry space !*' 



CHAPTER XVII. 

BY THE ATLANTIC CABLE. 

The most exciting and interesting portion of 
the great preparatory labors undertaken by the 
Club were now, so to speak, almost terminated, 
and the grand and final catastrophe was little 
more than two months off. '^ How near and 
yet how far !" In one sense, to the busy men 
whose hearts and souls were wrapped up in the 
experiment, the days would fly past with the 
rapidity of the ^^ swift winged arrows of light;" 
in another sense, to the public at large, thus 
suddenly deprived of its daily allowance of ab- 
sorbing excitement, without which existence was 
scarcely endurable, how miserably slow should 
those crawling sixty-four days be in dragging 
their dull length along ! Sixty-four cycles in 
Cathay, or even on the eastern shore of Mary- 
land, could hardly be more humdrum. Every- 
body determined that when making up his age 
for the approaching census of 1870, he would 
drop the next two months altogether, as they 
would not be worth counting in. 

Everybody was wrong. In less than one 
16 (241) 



242 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

week after the events recorded in our last chap- 
ter, an incident the most unexpected, the most 
extraordinary, the most incredible, the most im- 
probable, fell like a clap of thunder on the 
public ear, and once more aroused the astounded 
people to the highest pitch of excitement and 
surprise, Barbican himself not excepted. 

On the 30th of September, at forty-seven min- 
utes past three o'clock in the afternoon, a mes- 
senger handed Barbican an envelope containing 
a telegram transmitted by the Atlantic cable 
from Valentia, Ireland, to Trinity Bay, New- 
foundland, and thence overland to Tampa, 
Florida. Barbican broke the envelope, read 
the dispatch, and, in spite of his great self-con- 
trol his lips quivered, his cheeks lost their 
color, and his brow winced a little at the sight 
of its contents. 

They were only about thirty words in all. 

Here they are, copied literally from the original, 

still to be seen among the archives of the Gun 

Club: 

" Paris, France, Sepumher 30, 4 p. m. 
" Barbican. 

" Tampa, Florida, United States. 

'' For shell spherical, substitute projectile cylindro- 
conical, and I shall take a place inside. Shall arrive 
per AtL.nta'' " Michel Ardan." 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

WHO WAS HE ? 

If this startling communication, instead of 
flying over the wires, had come simply by post 
in an ordinary letter ; if the telegraph operators, 
French, Irish, Newfoundland, and American, 
had not already known and fully understood 
its meaning, Barbican would not have hesitated 
a single instant. He would have simply given 
it the deaf ear, and quietly proceeded with his 
work. Was not it most likely a silly hoax, 
particularly as it came from a Frenchman ? 
Could any man living ever dream of attempting 
such a fearful trip ? If he was in earnest, a 
bullet inside him was what he wanted, not one 
outside ; at all events, a place in a cylindro-coni- 
cal projectile would not suit him half as well 
as one in the strongest cell of a lunatic asylum. 

But the dispatch, from its nature, could not 

be kept secret, and by this time, no doubt, it 

was flying about through every State of the 

Union. Silence on the subject being evidently 

absurd, Barbican called all his colleagues together 

(243) 



244 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

and, without uttering a word for or against the 
credibility of the dispatch, read it aloud several 
times for his amazed, but not easily gulled, 
auditors. 

'' Impossible !*' '' Stuff and nonsense 1" '' Catch 
a weasel asleep ?'' ^^ Good joke !'* *' Not so 
verdant !" '* Wakes up the wrong passenger !'' 
'' Bogus !" '' Can't come it !'' ^^ Played out !" 
— in short, the whole vocabulary of phrases 
serving to express doubt, incredulity, suspicion, 
and contempt, formed the chorus that, with ap- 
propriate gesticulation, greeted the reading of 
this most singular telegram. They laughed at 
it, they pooh-poohed it, even the least suspi- 
cious shook their heads over it. Marston, how- 
ever, differed decidedly with his colleagues. His 
first exclamation on hearing the dispatch was : 

'^ What a grand idea !" 

*^ Very grand,*' replied the Major, '^ but such 
ideas as that should not be left lying about 
loose/' 

'^ Why not?'' asked Marston, ready for a dis- 
cussion, but the Major did not feel like arguing 
such a question. Barbican said nothing, but he 
thought to himself that if the dispatch really was 
a hoax, its sender must not only be very fond 
of a laugh but also very well able to pay for it. 



WHO WAS HE? 245 

Thirty words at five dollars each, the Atlantic 
cable tariff, made a very pretty sum in gold. 

In a few minutes, the name of Michael Ardan 
was as well known as Barbican's all over Tampa, 
where his proposition encountered pretty keen 
criticism. Everybody, stranger as well as native, 
considered it to be his duty to crack his little 
joke on the Quixotic proposition, and as Ardan 
himself — a myth, a phantom, the baseless fabric 
of a dream — was not there to hear their views 
on the matter, they spoke pretty freely to the 
best substitute they could find, namely, J. T. 
Marston, who was crazy enough to believe in 
his existence. The warmth of their expressions 
was certainly quite reasonable. Barbican's propo- 
sition to send a ball to the Moon — what was 
it ? A perfectly natural, feasible, legitimate en- 
terprise, a simple question of ballistics ! But 
that a being endowed with reason should vol- 
unteer to take a passage in this projectile, to 
tempt Providence by such an absurd piece of 
desperate recklessness — it was preposterous, mons- 
trous, silly, outrageous — in fact, it was unpleas- 
ant to talk about, and the fellow that started 
such an idea, should be treated at once to a 
straight jacket ! Marston was within an inch of 
being tarred and feathered. 



246 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

This way of viewing the question lasted nearly 
four hours — which is rather strange in a country 
where the word impossible has been omitted in 
the school dictionaries, and where the greater 
the difficulties an enterprise has to encountei 
the greater the favor by which it is regarded. 

Towards evening Ardan's idea began somehow 
to lose a little of its absurdity. To their surprise 
people began to find themselves thinking over 
the proposition without flying into a passion 
about it. They could not get it out of their 
heads. Its very novelty had a certain fascina- 
tion that was irresistible. Absurd ! What was 
absurd ? Had not Doctor Lardner proved the 
utter absurdity of ever attempting to cross the 
Atlantic in a steamer ? Had the world kept so 
still since that time that the new Doctor Lard- 
ners were more likely to be infallible than the 
old ? Besides, if a man is crazy enough to 
venture his life in such a mad undertaking, the 
world can easily bear his loss. Why spoil our 
tempers about him ? 

Was he or was he not a myth ? The name, 
it is true, was as well known in America 
as in Europe. Its owner had already figured 
in some enterprises of extraordinary daring. 
Disguised as a dervish, he had travelled further 



WHO WAS HE? 2A1 

and seen more than Vambery in Central Asia, 
where to be discovered was certain death. He 
had slain more lions in Africa than Gerard 
and Cummings put together. Balancing himself 
without a pole, he had carried two dogs in 
his arms on a tight rope stretched across the 
Grand Canal, Venice — a feat in which Blondin, 
after several unsuccessful attempts, acknowledged 
his utter inability to imitate him. But the 
name in itself proved nothing — it was the very 
one that, in case of a hoax, was most likely 
to be employed. Still, this expensive telegram, 
the name of the vessel in which he was said 
to have taken passage, the very short period 
beyond which it was impossible that the hoax 
could be prolonged — all these considerations be- 
gan to strike the people as having something 
genuine about them. Was it a hoax after all ? 
Doubt, uncertainty, suspense set in, and every 
one knows how painful it is to be in a state 
of suspense during a great excitement. Isolated 
individuals could not keep apart ; they formed 
groups ; the groups under the pressure of curi- 
osity, like atoms acted upon by molecular attrac- 
tion, condensed into crowds, and finally the 
throng became so compact that, unable to bear 
their condition any longer, they made a ** bee 



248 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

line'' for the hotel where Barbican had his 
rooms. 

Ever since the arrival of the dispatch, the 
President of the Gun Club had maintained a 
profound silence on the subject ; he listened to 
Marston's decided assertions, without opening 
his lips either in censure or encouragement. 
He was maintaining a masterly inactivity, quietly 
awaiting the march of events, fully determined 
not to compromise himself by any overt act, 
when all at once, to his utter disgust, he looked 
out and saw the whole population of Tampa 
assembled in dense masses under his windows. 
His old manoeuvres were now of no avail. The 
yells, outcries, and vociferations of the excited 
multitude soon brought him out on the balcony 
before them. Greatness has its inconveniences 
as well as its enjoyments. 

His appearance produced immediate and pro- 
found silence, which, after a few seconds, was 
broken by a voice in the crowd saying : 

^^ Mr. Barbican, we want to know if the man, 
Michael Ardan, the writer of the dispatch, is 
on his way here or not ?'* 

^' Gentlemen," replied Barbican, ^' that is a 
question that I am no more able to answer than 
you are yourselves.'' 



H^HO WAS HEf 249 

"Too thin! Too thin!'' roared several im- 
patient voices. 

" We must have an answer !" roared others. 

" Time will give you an answer/' replied Bar- 
bican coldly. 

"Live horse till you get grass!" cried some 
wit in the crowd, but all were too excited to 
laugh. ^ ' 

"Answer! A plain answer!" resounded from 
all quarters. 

" Gentlemen," replied Barbican in a clear 
voice, emphasizing his words by earnest gesticu- 
lation, " really I have no answer to give you." 

" Mr. Barbican, we believe you," cried the 
man in the crowd who had first spoken, " but 
there is another question that you can answer. 
Have you made the change in the plan of the 
shell that is suggested by the dispatch ?" 

" Not yet, gentlemen ; but now that you re- 
mind me of the dispatch, I think I shall be 
able to give answers satisfactory to your ques- 
tions in the course of a few hours. I am going 
directly to the telegraph office." 

" Let us all go to the telegraph office !" cried 
the crowd, following Barbican to the North 
American Buildings, corner of Marion and Mag- 
nolia streets. 



250 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

A few minutes afterwards a dispatch was sent 
to the oftice of the Liman Line of steamers, 
Liverpool, asking an immediate reply to the 
following questions : 

'' When was the Atlanta to set sail ? For 
what port was she bound ? Had she on board 
a Frenchman named Michael Ardan ?'* 

In about two hours an answer came back, 
too formal and precise in its assertions to leave 
any further doubt possible. 

'' The steamer Atla?ita, of Liverpool, was to 
leave port on the 2d of October, bound for 
Tampa direct, having on board a Frenchman 
named, as recorded on the registry book, Michael 
Ardan/' 

This confirmation of the first dispatch made 
Barbican' s eyes glitter with a sudden flash ; his 
fingers clenched themselves violently, and a few 
quick-eared bystanders heard him muttering 
hoarsely : 

'^It is true then! He's in earnest! And he'll 
be here in little more than two weeks ! He must 
be crazy ! No matter ! Crazy or not, I shall 

never consent '* But in spite of his 

resolution, he wrote that very night to Meneely . 
& Co., Albany, telling them to suspend opera- 
tions on the projectile till further orders. 



WHO WAS HE? 251 

But as for undertaking to describe the state 
of feeling produced throughout all America by 
the startling dispatch ; how it completely eclipsed 
even Barbican' s famous communication ; how 
the papers went into ecstacies about the idea 
and its originator, the trans-Atlantic hero whose 
arrival on the American Continent they were 
so soon to have the delight of recording ; how 
everybody counted the hours, the minutes, even 
the seconds, in their feverish agitation ; how the 
minds of all, rich and poor, old and young, 
without exception, succumbed completely to the 
dominant idea ; how the laboring people of 
Tampa could not work, the dealers could not 
sell, the ships ready to sail remained moored in 
port, waiting the arrival of the Atlanta ; how 
the trains arrived choking with passengers, and 
went away empty ; how Tampa Bay was alive 
with steamboats, sailing ships, yachts, schooners 
sloops, and coasters of all dimensions ; how 
the endless crowds of visitors kept flocking into 
Tampa from all quarters in such numbers as to 
be obliged to camp out in tents like a vast 
army — I say, to describe these things adequately, 
or even to give the reader more than a faint 
idea of what an excited state of feeling pre- 
vailed everywhere, is a task so much above the 



252 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

powers of the ordinary writer that even Dickens' 
magic pen would recoil before it in despair. 

On the 2oth of October, early in the morning, 
the watchman at Gary's Fort Light House, in 
southeast Florida, signalled a thick smoke in 
the offing. Two hours later he telegraphed to 
Tampa that a large steamer named the Atlanta 
was passing before him. Though her arrival be- 
fore the next day was impossible, nobody slept 
in Tampa that night. At four o'clock next 
morning she was seen entering the Hillsboro Nar- 
rows with full steam on, and a little after five, 
she cast anchor at pier No. 6 South Wharves. 

Long before this, however, while she was 
treading the mazes of the channel at less than 
quarter speed, the Atlanta had been surrounded 
by innumerable boats, and boarded by excited 
crowds, who could 7iot be kept oif. Barbican 
was the first man that cleared the nettings and 
jumped on deck. 

'' Michael Ardan !'* he shouted, in accents full 
of an emotion which he in vain tried to sup- 
press. 

"' Present !" was answered by a somewhat sin- 
gular looking individual standing on the poop- 
deck. 

Barbican said no more, but with arms 



WHO WAS HE? 253 

folded, he leaned against the bulwarks and 
took a long, steady, and searching survey of 
the wonderful passenger by the Atlanta. 

He was a man of some forty-two years, tall 
but stooped a little already, like Atlas when 
carrying the world on his shoulders. His head, 
large and shaggy as a lion's, showed a flowing 
mass of reddish hair that reminded you of a 
mane. A face short, round, and wide at the 
temples, a moustache bristling like a cat's, little 
tufts of yellow hair almost covering his cheeks, 
eyes large but a little unsteady in their glance 
and evidently nearsighted, completed a physi- 
ognomy essentially feline. But the nose was bold, 
the mouth particularly sweet and human, and the 
forehead high, intelligent, and furrowed like a 
field never allowed to lie fallow. Finally, a body 
stout, shapely and well set on long legs, arms 
light and easy of movement but powerful as 
sledge-hammers, with a general air of decision 
and self-reliance, gave Barbican the idea that this 
man was a right good fellow, well built in 
body and mind, or, as he expressed it himself 
in a foundryman's phraseology, that he was 
'^ forged not cast." 

A phrenologist would have no difficulty in 
detecting his bump of ^' combativeness," that 



254 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

is, courage in danger and readiness to face ob- 
stacles ; a strong development of '^ benevo- 
lence and wonder/' that is, a love of the mar- 
vellous carried to a total forgetfulness of self ; 
but, on the other hand, for the bump of '* ac- 
quisitiveness,'' or a desire to get and keep. Gall 
himself might search long, but search in vain. 

His clothes were well cut, but remarkably 
ample and easy fitting, the ends of his cravat 
fluttered in the breeze, a low turn down col- 
lar revealed the proportions of his robust neck, 
and his ungloved, restless hands never gave 
themselves the time to button his wristbands. 
Looking at him, you readily felt, somehow, 
that no danger was so appalling, no winter so 
piercing as ever to give such a man as that a 
chill, either in heart or limb, body or soul. 

Never keeping still a moment on deck, he 
hurried continually here and there, ^* dragging 
his anchor," as the sailors said, gesticulating, 
talking to everybody, and gnawing his nails 
with feverish inquietude. He was, in short, 
one of those originals spoken of by somebody 
as being occasionally framed in one of her 
whimsical moods by Dame Nature, who then 
immediately breaks the mould. He was well 
worth analyzing if we had only the time to 



WHO WAS HE? 255 

do it. A perpetual prey to hyperbole, he 
could never get over his love of superla- 
tives ; the retina of his eyes giving gigantic 
proportions to whatever he looked at, he pas- 
sionately loved the extravagant, and naturally 
magnified everything — except difficulties. 

Of a nature luxuriating in vitality, he was an 
artist by instinct, and a humorist in spite of 
himself; only he never said epigrammatic things, 
which always betray an effort, but, feeling in- 
tensely w^hatever he expressed, his manner rather 
than his words invested even his most fleeting 
thoughts with a light, a color, a variety, a 
spontaneity that rendered them far more charm- 
ing, and certainly far less oppressive, than the 
vividest scintillations of the professional wit. 

In discussion, regardless of logic, deaf to 
syllogism, he fought his battles his own way ; 
little caring for cunning of fence or superiority 
of vantage ground, the more desperate the case 
the more he delighted to defend it, and he 
plied his blows so rapidly, striking his opponent 
right and left, assailing him tooth and nail, 
never giving him an instant's breathing time, 
that not unfrequently with all the odds against 
him, he ended by flooring his man, no one 
could tell how. 



256 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

One of his favorite manias was to proclaim 
himself " a sublime ignoramus/* as Voltaire 
called Shakspeare, and he actually prided him- 
self on his profound contempt for scientific men. 
^' What are they good for ?'* he would often 
ask. ^' Like billiard markers, they use their 
figures just to score the points, while you and 
I play the game.'* Adventurous, but no adven- 
turer ; a Bohemian, but not of the ordinary 
type ; a Don Quixote, but not a Tom Sayres ; a 
Phaeton, but no timid youth driving his father's 
horses at half speed ; an Icarus, but not trust- 
ing to one pair of wings ; he rushed recklessly, 
'^ bald-headed*' as the Americans say, into 
every new enterprise of the hour, burned his 
ships behind him more defiantly than Cortez, and 
though thousands of times exposed to the most 
imminent dangers, he ended invariably by fall- 
ing on his feet, like a cat flung out of a fifth- 
story window. 

If Barbican's motto, — JVtl desperandum / Never 
give up the ship ! — showed the undying game 
of the Saxon, Ardan's favorite expression — Quand 
meme / What of it ! — proved the dauntless and 
irrepressible pluck of the Celt. 

Such qualities carried to excess seldom benefit 
any man. ^^ Who risks nothing, nothing has,*' 



IVHO WAS HEP 257 

is a proverb of very doubtful utility. Ardan 
risked every thing and still had nothing ! 
Giving him money, was throwing it into a bot- 
tomless pit. Not that it had all gone in mad 
adventures ; on the contrary, his heart being 
just as good as his head was flighty, he was 
quite as ready any day to relieve a family in 
distress as to start on an expedition to the 
North Pole ; chivalrous, disinterested, incapable 
of selfish calculations, he would tear up the 
death warrant of his bitterest enemy, and cheer- 
fully forfeit his own liberty to set a poor slave 
free. 

Well known in France — what country of 
Europe indeed had not witnessed his escapades ? — 
his name figuring every day in the public papers, 
every action of his known, every word of his 
quoted, he had been fair game for every wit, 
and he had pointed the moral of every maga- 
zine writer. For you may be sure, he had 
made for himself a noble army of enemies by the 
way he had of jostling, pushing, treading on 
corns, and even upsetting people as he fearlessly 
elbowed his way through the crowded sidewalks 
of social life. 

Still, though looked on somewhat as a spoiled 

child, he was generally liked ; yes, take him all 
17 



258 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

in all, he was rather admired than censured by 
the world at large. When people got wind of 
some new foolhardy enterprise of his, they would 
even put on airs of concern, and remonstrate 
against the folly of running himself into inevit- 
able danger. But he easily got rid of such 
friends by a quiet smile and one or two favor- 
ite expressions that he was very fond of quot- 
ing. '^Danger! Threaten a duck with water!** 
^* Danger ! Not a particle, if you only keep 
your top eye open ; it is only its own trees 
that burn a forest !'* 

Such was the restless, daring, emotional, im- 
pulsive, passionate, incomprehensible being that 
Barbican had been now gazing at for nearly a 
quarter of an hour with the most absorbing in- 
terest. No wonder if he had found him an 
attractive subject, for, independent of Ardan's 
object in coming to America, surely nature had 
never formed two creatures presenting a stronger 
contrast to each other, mentally and physically, 
than the European and the American that were 
now standing so close to each other on the deck 
of the Atlanta, 

Barbican' s perspicacity was gradually begin- 
ning to convince him that a man as brave, 
enterprising, and full of resources as himself, 



WHO WAS HEf 259 

though in a different way, stood before him, 
when he found his study of character suddenly 
cut short by the hurrahs and the cheers of the 
crowd, become by this time perfectly frantic 
in its enthusiasm. Their shouts were now so 
loud, their demonstrations of friendship so bois- 
terous, their hand shaking in particular of such 
a violent nature, that Ardan not relishing the 
idea of having his fingers crushed into a jelly, 
found himself compelled to make a precipitate 
retreat below into his state-room. 

After a little while, Barbican followed him, 
knocked quietly at the door, and presented his 
card without saying a word. 

'^ Hello ! Barbican, is it you ?*' cried Ardan, 
as heartily and familiarly as if he were talking 
to an old friend of twenty years' standing. 

*' Yes,'* replied the President of the Gun 
Club, quietly. 

^' Glad to see you, old boy ! How are you ? 
Quite well ? Glad to hear it, Barbican. De- 
lighted to hear it !'' 

*^ You are still determined on that idea?'* 
replied Barbican, paying no attention to outside 
matter. 

'' What idea ? Oh ! Going to the Moon. 
Certainly, quite decided." 



260 THE BALTIMORE. GUN CLUB, 

*^ Nothing can change your mind ?'* 

*^ Nothing whatever. Have you made the 
modifications in the projectile alluded to in my 
dispatch ?*' 

** Not yet. I was waiting to see you. But/' 
continued Barbican, again asking the question, 
*^ have you reflected on all the *' 

** Reflected ? Never did such a thing. Mere 
waste of time. I find I have a chance of get- 
ting to the Moon, and I avail myself of the 
opportunity. That's my way of putting it.'' 

Barbican 's gaze expressed a new instalment of 
surprise when he heard the man talking as 
coolly and unconcernedly as if the trip meant 
no more than a day's shooting on Lake Okee- 
chobee, or a flying visit to Havana. 

^^ But, of course," he resumed, ^^ you have 
considered the difficulties — devised some means 
of overcoming them — adopted some plan " 

^^ You're right, my dear Barbican," inter- 
rupted Ardan, ^^ I have considered, devised, 
adopted, as you express it in your admirable 
concise English. Excuse mine — I picked it up 
here and there — never took a lesson — never read 
an English book — talked a good deal with Kos- 
suth for practice — it is like myself— jerking, 
outlandish, nondescript. But it serves my pur- 



WHO WAS HE? 261 

pose — allow me, I know exactly what you're 
going to say. The very thing I'm coming to. 
I have no objection whatever to tell you all 
about myself and my plans. But it would be 
pure waste of time — should have to tell it all 
over again to the next man. Know something 
better than that. You put a little notice in the 
papers, calling your friends, the whole city, all 
Florida, all America, if you like, to a meeting 
in some handy place to-morrow or day after. 
There I shall develop my plans, and answer in 
public every possible objection. Don't be un- 
easy — I know what I'm about — used to this sort 
of thing. That suit, eh ?" 

'^ That suits exactly," replied Barbican, re- 
turning immediately to the deck. There he 
took advantage of the momentary silence pro- 
duced by his reappearance, to announce to the 
impatient multitude Ardan's intention of ad- 
dressing them all next day at a public meeting, 
and answering every objection that could be 
made to his extraordinary project. It is need- 
less to say that this intelligence was hailed with 
the most joyful acclamations. It gave instant 
satisfaction : all uneasy impatience was at once 
allayed j to-morrow everybody would have an 
opportunity of hearing and seeing at his ease 



262 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

the wonderful European. By degrees the im- 
mense crowds began to disperse, but all the 
morning and even all the afternoon excited 
groups of spectators filled the deck of the 
Atlanta, and hung around the neighboring 
wharves in such numbers that the passengers 
could hardly get their trunks out, and the cus- 
tom house men gave up all idea of unloading 
the freight before the following day. 

Many, indeed, in their excitement, remained 
on deck all night in spite of the remonstrances 
made by the captain, who, however, like a wise 
man, had no notion of resorting to extreme 
measures ; for the enthusiasm was confined to 
no class, color, or section. The Southern peo- 
ple of the Union are said to be much less 
notorious than their brothers of the North for 
their proneness towards hero worship, or their 
avidity to see sights. But on this occasion the 
most impartial observer could find no especial 
sectional preponderance in the crowds remaining 
on deck. North, South, East, and West were 
very near equally represented. The particular 
idioms, the preferences for certain pronunciations, 
the singularities of accent which a practised ear 
can proclaim to be characteristic of certain sec- 
tions of the country, were mingled together 



WHO WAS HE? 263 

with wonderful regularity. The hyar*s, the tote's, 
the she7ia?tiga?is, the allow' s, the Howdy' s ? the 
afs, the reck'n's, the e7it/mse's, the thar s, the 
y^^'i*, the moufs, the j-^t^/j/'j-, the you-tms, the 
we-unsy the Ftz/^/^j", and other peculiarities of 
the South and West were fully counterbalanced 
if not neutralized by the swa7i' s ! the calc' late's, 
the flunk's, the guess's, the keow's, the hefidy's, 
the hull's, the hiwi's, the kwer's, the shet's, the 
stoop's, the haifif s, and other solecisms of the 
North and East. 

The most enthusiastic of the enthusiastic was 
Secretary Marston. Securing the camp chair, 
which he had noticed to be occupied for a 
moment during the day by Ardan, he had es- 
tablished himself comfortably in it, and there he 
remained all night, sitting on the poop deck, 
and haranguing an audience that never grew 
tired of hearing him. The subject of his text 
of course was Ardan, and the refrain which oc- 
curred every ten minutes or so, tickled his hearers 
so much, that they took it up at once and re- 
peated it most enthusiastically and with very 
great effect. It was as follows : 

^^ He is even as one among ten thousand: the 
best of us beside him are nothing but small pota- 
toes /" 



264 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

Barbican had slipped away early in the after- 
noon and rejoined Ardan in a private parlor, 
where they had taken dinner together, and 
where they remained talking together as earnestly 
and as familiarly as two old friends, until eight 
bells rang out the midnight watch, ordered all 
the lights to be extinguished, and told the 
Club man that it was time to retire. 

He made his way as well as he could over 
the decks, which he found still thronged with 
people mostly all awake, drinking in Marston's 
endless discourse with delight — and even occa- 
sionally joining in it, for Barbican had not quite 
reached his hotel, which stood a few squares off, 
when he heard a mighty chorus like the sound 
of many waters, rising high and clear and 
strong in the sweet autumn night, and bearing 
on the sea breeze of the fragrant Southern clime 
words that his ear could plainly distinguish : 

^^ For he is one among ten thousand : the best 
of us beside ht?n are nothing but small potatoes /" 



CHAPTER XIX. 

ARDAN DEFINES EVERY PLANK AND SPLINTER OF 
HIS PLATFORM. 

Never did a more lovely sky display its 
sapphires, amethysts and rubies in the glowing 
East than that of October 2 2d, and never were 
its glories more completely wasted on unap- 
preciative spectators than they were that morn- 
ing on the people of Tampa. The sun rose 
punctually at his appointed time, eight minutes 
after six, but in their impatience they would 
have considered him a laggard had he even 
wrought a special miracle in their behalf by 
rising two hours earlier. Many saw him rise 
for the first time in all their lives, and most 
probably also for the last. Long before seven 
every man in the town had breakfasted, shaved 
and dressed, and by eight the streets were 
alive with people hurrying to the meeting, 
though it was not to take place before three in 
the afternoon. 

Barbican, apprehensive of the effect of indis- 
creet questions addressed to Ardan, would have, 

(265) 



266 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

perhaps, preferred confining his audience to a 
few learned friends ; but he might as well attempt 
to dam Niagara with a Virginia fence, or keep 
out the Atlantic with a sweeping brush. It 
was no doubt exceedingly risky, but nothing 
else could now be done than to let his new 
friend run the chances of a public meeting. 

The new City Hall, though a very spacious 
building, being altogether too small to accommo- 
date the immense numbers desirous of seeing 
the orator, a large level plain about half a 
mile east of Tampa, not far from the camping 
ground, had been fixed on as the place of meet- 
ing. From the previous evening a large force 
of workmen had been employed in preparing 
it ; their labors continued all the night and 
next morning, with such unremitting industry, 
that, a little before twelve o'clock, the ropes 
surrounding the enclosure could be taken away, 
and free admission given to the public. The 
principal object of their labors had been to de- 
fend the audience from the fierce rays of a 
Florida sun, which even at the end of October 
often sends the thermometer up to 90. By means 
of spare masts and sails, readily furnished by the 
ships in the harbor, telegraph poles, of which 
a large supply had just arrived, and old con- 



ARDAN'S PLATFORM. 267 

demned canvas obtained in almost unlimited 
quantities at Fort Brooke, where it had been 
mouldering away since the Osceola war, they 
succeeded in erecting a monstrous tent nearly 
a thousand feet long, eight hundred wide 
and fifty high. Ample as was the space it 
afforded, it was not an inch too large for the 
300,000 spectators, who had taken possession 
of every available spot in less than half an hour 
after the circumscribing ropes had been with- 
drawn. Here, in a sweltering heat, for three 
long hours, they waited for the arrival of the 
Frenchman, with tolerable tranquillity and even 
with something like good humor. With good 
reason an American crov/d is considered the 
most patient in the world. Of the immense 
number here assembled no more than the first 
third could both see and hear, the second third 
might possibly see but could not possibly hear, 
and as for the others, they could not possibly 
either see or hear. Still this last third was 
quite as orderly as the rest, except at the ap- 
plauding time when, once commenced, they 
could never tell at what time to stop, and kept 
on shouting until they had become a nuisance. 
At three o'clock, Ardan made his appearance, 
accompanied by the principal members of the 



268 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

Gun Club. He had on his right hand Barbi- 
can, and on his left Marston, radiant as the 
midday sun and strutting like a drum-major of 
the Home Guards. 

A small platform, four or five feet high, had 
been • erected in front of the middle of the 
stage. This he immediately ascended, and 
calmly surveyed the ocean of black hats that 
lay at his feet. He did not manifest the least 
embarrassment ; he struck no oratorical atti- 
tude ; he appeared as he really was, quite at 
his ease and in excellent spirits. The cheers 
that welcomed him he acknowledged by a 
graceful bow, then, raising his hand as a sig- 
nal for silence, he commenced his speech, his 
foreign accent only very slightly marring his 
English pronunciation. 

^^ Gentlemen,*' he began, *^ though it is ex- 
ceedingly warm, I must trespass on your atten- 
tion for a short time, while I try to present 
some explanations regarding certain projects 
which appear to interest you. I am no orator ; 
I am no scientific man. I try to hold my 
own at an argument, but I could never make 
a speech. I have the honor of appearing be- 
fore you in public, simply because, in the first 
place, by doing so I save you and myself 



ARDAN'S PLATFORM, 269 

much valuable time, and in the second, because 
my honorable friend, President Barbican, has 
assured me that such an arrangement was most 
in accordance with your wishes. Listen then 
for a little while with your six hundred thou- 
sand ears and don't be too hard on the slips 
of the speaker.'* 

This free and easy exordium seemed to please 
the fancy of the audience, who testified their 
satisfaction by loud murmurs of applause. 

** Gentlemen,'' he continued, '^ I want it to 
be distinctly understood that I require no further 
favor. *Hiss or applaud, as you feel like it. I 
absolve you from all constraint. For I must 
warn you that I am an extremely ignorant fel- 
low, and, moreover, that my ignorance is of 
the very worst possible kind. I read some- 
where that you had once in your armies a gen- 
eral so exceedingly stupid that, though he often 
and often lost the battle, he never had the 
sense to know it. Often and often he was 
thrashed so badly that any other general in his 
place would at once have displayed surpassing 
ability in running away to save the rest of the 
army ; but this ignorant general, being too shal- 
low-brained to see that he was thrashed, of 
course never thought of running away, and, as 



270 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

some one had to run away, the enemy was always 
accommodating enough to do it. (Applause.) 
Now that's the kind of a man I am. I am 
so exceedingly ignorant that I am ignorant 
even of difQcuUies ! (Loud applause.) 

^^ Instead of difficult, I think it the most simple, 
the most natural, and the most easy thing in the 
world to take passage m a projectile and start 
for the Moon. Such a journey must be made 
sooner or later, and the mode of effecting it is 
only a simple consequence of the great law of 
progress. Man begins locomotion on all fours, 
then he finds that two of his limbs are quite 
sufficient to propel himself with quite comfort- 
ably. Does he then stop ? Not at all. He 
takes in quick succession to velocipedes, sleds, 
market wagons, omnibuses, sulkies, buggies, car- 
riages, canoes, boats, yachts, ships ! Does he 
stop there ? So far from it that by this time 
he has got to steamers, railroad cars and bal- 
loons ! Is this to be the final impassable end ? 
Who says so ? What King Canute has drawn 
his mark on the shore powerful enough to re- 
sist for ever the great billows of progress so 
uncompromising in their onward sweep ? No, 
gentlemen. Man can no more come to a 
stand-still now than ever. A new era is dawn- 



ARDAN'S PLATFORM. 271 

ing in the annals of locomotion. The pro- 
jectile is the vehicle of the future. The sim- 
plest, the most natural, the most obvious of 
all vehicles ! What is our old mother Earth, 
the original vehicle, the easiest going and most 
perfect of all vehicles, what is she but a pro- 
jectile launched on her way by the omnipotent 
hand of our Creator ? Are the planets and the 
stars anything else than projectiles moving with 
inconceivable velocity ? Does this velocity en- 
danger their safety ? Not in the most remote 
degree. But if not injurious in their case, even 
when carried to an extreme, how can it be an 
objection to our contemplated projectile ? Let 
me give you a few examples in living figures, 
which of course everybody already knows, but 
which I must remind you of in order to 
guide you to my conclusions.'' 

The audience listened with breathless atten- 
tion. ** I shall give only round numbers,'* he 
went on, ^* which are near enough for our 
present purposes. Neptune moves at the rate 
of 12,000 miles an hour j Uranus, 17,000 ; 
Saturn, 22,000; Jupiter, 29,000; Mars, 55,000; 
the Earth, 68,000 ; Venus, 80,000 ; Mercury, 
130,000 ; certain comets as much as 3,500,000 
miles an hour when at their perihelion ! Com- 



272 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

pared with these velocities what is our projec- 
tile ? A mere crawler, hardly better than a 
snail, as its initial velocity, at best only 25,000 
miles an hour, is soon rapidly retarded. I ap- 
peal to your own good sense, if that is any- 
thing to be seriously excited about, especially 
as it is sure to be surpassed, some of these 
days, by velocities still greater, of which light 
and electricity will be the probable agents.'' 

No one appeared disposed to dispute assertions 
made so positively and sustained so plausibly. 

'* Gentlemen,'' he went on, ^^ if we are to 
believe certain narrow-minded partisans — ^just 
the word for them — humanity, enclosed forever 
in a vicious circle out of which there is no 
escape, must resign itself to perpetual imprison- 
ment in this little earth of ours and to no 
closer acquaintance with yonder starry hosts 
than can be obtained by a look at them 
through a telescope. But we don't believe that 
those one-sided self-deluders know anything at all 
about it ! For my part, I believe their notions 
to be all wrong, because they are founded on 
ignorance and are regardless of analogy. I be- 
lieve that the day is coming when the great ethe- 
rial ocean enveloping the universe can be crossed, 
when we can take passage for the Moon, for the 



ARDAN'S PLATFORM. 273 

planets, for the stars, as we now take passage 
from New York to Liverpool, as easily, as rap- 
idly, as safely ! Distance ! Distance is only 
a relative term, and, within certain limits, will 
end by being reduced to zero !'' 

However favorably his hearers seemed to re- 
gard the orator, this astounding assertion was 
certainly too much for them. Ardan appeared 
to comprehend this as he resumed calmly : 

*' As I seem to be getting somewhat ahead 
of my story, gentlemen, let us argue the point 
a little. In what time, let me ask you, would 
an express train, running little more than thirty 
miles an hour, reach the Moon ? Three hun- 
dred days. No more. Not even nine times a 
trip round the world. Few travellers or sailors 
worthy of the name, have not gone much fur- 
ther in their day. Consider now that, once 
started, I shall be only 97 hours on the road ! 
Ah, you think the Moon is very far off, and 
that, before taking such a leap, I ought to see 
very well what I'm about. But what would 
you say if I thought of making an excursion 
to Neptune, wheeling as he does in an orbit 
nearly 3 billions of miles distant from the sun ! 
That is a promenade that few of us could take, 
even at the regular railroad charge of i^ve cents 



274 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

a mile ! Rothschild himself, with all his 200 
million dollars, would at last have to be shoved 
off the train for not paying his fare !*' 

The assembly seemed to relish this style of 
handling an argument, particularly as Ardan, 
full of his subject, went into it heart and soul. 
Feeling his audience and himself to be in per- 
fect sympathy, he continued with an easy and 
graceful assurance : 

*^ My friends, immense as is the distance sep- 
arating us from Neptune, he is only our next 
door neighbor, when compared with some of 
the fixed stars. Here we are encountered with 
figures of such vast value, the least of them 
nine digits long, that we must take a billion 
for the unit. Excuse me for being so well 
posted on these points, and attribute it all to 
the absorbing nature of the subject. Listen and 
judge for yourselves ! Alpha Centauri, the 
nearest star to our system, is 20,000 billions 
of miles distant ; 61 Cygni is three times as 
far ; Sirius, seven times ; Polaris, sixteen times ; 
Capella, twenty-one times \ and the other stars, 
thousands and millions and even billions of 
times as far away ! Now talk about the dis- 
tance of our planets from the sun ! Distance ! 
It is no distance at all ! Pure hallucination to 



ARDAN'S PLATFORM. 275 

call such contiguity distance ! Do you know 
what I think of our whole solar system, begin- 
ning with the orb of day and ending with 
Neptune ? Do you really wish to hear my 
notion of the matter ? (We do ! Yes, yes ! 
Let us have it !) Well, it is very simple ! To 
me our whole solar system, in comparison with 
the rest of the universe, is one solid compact, 
homogeneous body. The planets composing it 
touch, adhere, press together, and the space ex- 
isting between them is only the space separating 
the molecules of the densest metal, iron, silver, 
platina ! Such being my conviction, I think 
I have the right to affirm, and to repeat with 
a confidence that must tell on every one that 
hears me : Distance is but a relative term ; 
and, taken in a certain sense, in fact, there is 
no such thing at all as distance T' 

** Hurrah !" cried the assembly, electrified by 
the emphatic gestures and thrilling tones of the 
orator. 

*•' It stands to reason !** cried Marston louder 
than the rest, jumping up from his seat ; '' dis- 
tance is an exploded idea !'* he continued, forget- 
ting in his excitement that he was on the edge 
of a platform at least ten feet high. Barbican's 
coolness, however, and strong arms once more 



276 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

saved his friend from being convinced by pain- 
ful experience that distance was anything but 
an exploded idea. In the general excitement, 
nobody seemed to notice this little incident, 
and the orator continued in thrilling tones : 

*' Friends — for so I must nov/ call you, as I 
feel from your sympathy that my words have 
not fallen in vain, and that this question has 
been resolved to your satisfaction — if any one 
still lingers among you unconvinced, it is either 
because he has not heard me, or because I have 
been too timid in my demonstrations, too feeble 
in my arguments, or too little conversant with 
illustrative details. (Loud cries of No ! No !) 
However that may be, I repeat it again, that, 
considering the infinite vastness of the universe, 
in the eye of a thinking man, the distance be- 
tween the earth and her satellite is something 
altogether too insignificant to give him any 
serious trouble in overcoming it. I don't think 
I hazard too much when I say, the day is fast 
approaching when we shall have projectile trains 
to the Moon, mail, express and accommodation ! 
And in such trains what a luxury to travel ! 
The perfect realization of the poetry of motion ! 
What are your palace cars of the Pacific Rail- 
road in comparison ? No collisions, no jarring. 




PROJECTILE TRAINS FOR THE MOON. 



ARDAN'S PLATFORM. QTll 

no noise, no snapping of rails, no misplacement 
of switches, no telescoping, no burning passengers 
alive by the upsetting of stoves, no caving in 
of embankments, no crushing under falling tun- 
nels, not a single one, in short, of the num- 
berless accidents to which ordinary travelling is 
exposed, is possible on our great Lunar Rail- 
road, the only one that really deserves the 
name of the Air Line !*' 

Loud applause greeted this sally, which was 
considered pretty good for a foreigner. 

^^ In less than twenty years from now, half 
the Earth will have visited the Moon !*' 

^^ Hurrah 1 Hurrah !'' cried the nearest part 
of the audience, taking every one of the 
orator's words for gospel truth. 

" Hurrah ! Hurrah !*' cried those next, still 
louder, thinking he was going to start on his 
trip, then and there before their faces. 

*' Hurrah ! Hurrah !" cried the third part, 
those farthest off, loudest of all, though they 
had not yet heard a word, nor even caught the 
first glimpse of the speaker. 

*^ Hurrah for Ardan !'* cried all together, 
with a cheer that made the great awning over 
head heave like the mighty billows of the Atlan- 
tic after an equinoctial storm. 



278 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

** Nay, my friends/' cried Ardan in reply, 
his clarion voice piercing the dense volumes of 
sound like a winged arrow, until it reached the 
outside edge, where it sounded like the faint 
far off cry of a bird at sea. '*• My dear friends, 
excuse me, surely you don't forget ! Three 
cheers for Barbican ! The worthy countryman 
of Franklin, who snared the lightning; and of 
Morse, who made it a postman ; he has revolu- 
tionized travelling, by manufacturing a winged 
steed out of gun powder, and a triumphal 
chariot out of a cannon ball !'' 

The mighty yell that rushed out of the 300,- 
000 throats at this speech, lifted the central 
portion of the awning clean up off the timbers 
of the roof for ten or fifteen feet, and kept it 
there for a few seconds, extending over them 
without visible support like the dome of a vast 
St. Peter's. It would probably have burst with 
a terrific explosion, only for the fortunate rip- 
ping of several places which, on account of the 
hurry and confusion, had been sewed by inferior 
sewing machines. 

Barbican bowed his thanks, but did not offer 
to speak. 

When the hurricane of sound began to die 
away, and the violent excitement to be sue- 



ARDAN'S PLATFORM, 279 

ceeded by a slight reaction, Ardan again ad- 
dressed the meeting : 

^'Now, gentlemen, as we appear to have arrived 
at a good mutual understanding, I come to the 
second object of our meeting, and I have the 
honor to state that I shall be delighted to lis- 
ten to any questions you may choose to make, 
and that I am willing to answer them as well as 
I can.'' 

No one spok^, but all looked at Barbican. 

The President of the Gun Club, so far, had 
every reason to be satisfied with the manner in 
which Ardan had acquitted himself. He had 
spoken on a subject of which he was complete 
master, and which his lively imagination had 
enabled him to handle brilliantly, if not logi- 
cally. But if practical questions, where imagina- 
tion went for nothing and actual experience was 
everything, should now come up for discussion. 
Barbican had very serious doubts regarding his 
new friend's ability to come off with flying 
colors. Before any one else, therefore, could 
give him some posing questions, he hastened to 
pull him off dangerous ground, by asking him if 
he thought the Moon or the planets were in- 
habited. 

*^ That's rather a difficult question to answer 



280 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

categorically/' replied the unsuspicious Ardan, 
readily falling into the trap. ^' Many men of 
great intelligence, Plutarch, Bernardin de Saint 
Pierre, Fontenelle, the elder Herschel, Sir 
David Brewster, Doctor Lardner, have pro- 
nounced decidedly in the affirmative. Looking 
at the question from a philosophical stand-point, 
I am rather disposed to share their opinion. It 
all turns on the answer to another question — 
Are the planets habitable ? If they are, I should 
say that, since nothing can be conceived to ex- 
ist uselessly, they either are inhabited, have 
been, or will be. Now, my opinion is that they 
ai^e habitable.*' 

'*' Excuse me, Mr. Ardan, for differing with 
such a distinguished gentleman," interrupted a 
voice in the crowd, which Barbican recognized 
at once as coming from the man who had been 
the spokesman on the famous evening of Ardan 's 
dispatch, and whom he had since learned to be 
a journeyman shoemaker of a literary turn, and 
the president of the Orion Debating Society, 
Catharine Street, Philadelphia. " Excuse my 
boldness, Mr. Ardan,'' he went on, '* but you 
must be aware that there are very serious ob- 
jections against your idea of the habitability of 
other worlds than ours. To go no further than 



ARDAN'S PLATFORM. 281 

the planets — some of them are so far from the sun, 
and others are so near, that creatures organized 
like us could not possibly live in either. We 
should be roasted alive or frozen to death.*' 

'^ A very proper objection on your part, my 
dear sir,*' said Barbican, delighted to see the 
discussion taking such a harmless turn, '^ but 
one which, I feel confident, my friend can 
answer without the slightest difficulty." 

''With none whatever," resumed Ardan, ''and 
if only the time and the place permitted, 
nothing would give me greater pleasure than to 
answer the gentleman point by point and step 
by step. If I were a scientific man I should 
prove to him that the temperature of a planet 
depends on other causes than its relative distance 
from the sun. I should convince him that the 
condition of its atmosphere, the internal heat 
of its mass, the phosphorescence of its light, 
the electric effects of its chemical action, 
may so counterbalance relative proximity or 
remoteness that even a Mercurian may readily 
experience all the gloom and cold of our 
winter, and even a Neptunian enjoy all the 
light and warmth of our summer. If I 
were a naturalist, I could show the gentleman 
that even on our earth nature reveals to us many 



282 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

examples of life flourishing under very different 
conditions ; that fishes inhabit an element fatal 
to other animals ; that frogs, lizards, alligators 
and other amphibia enjoy a doublefold existence 
very difficult to explain ; that certain sharks 
and other inhabitants of the ocean sustain life 
in depths where the pressure of the sea, though 
as enormous as that of fifty or sixty atmos- 
pheres, does them no harm whatever ; that cer- 
tain aquatic insects, perfectly insensible of tem- 
perature, are found alive equally in springs of 
boiling hot water and in the frozen plains of 
the Polar Ocean ; that even in strong acids 
that would instantly kill any animal or even 
insect they touched, myriads of living creatures 
find their home ; that even in dark lakes in 
the bowels of the earth below the craters of 
active burning mountains, the volcano fishes 
flourish so abundantly that an eruption often 
shoots them out in thousands, mingled with 
the cinders, the smoke and the burning lava ; 
in short, that, as the omnipotence of the Deity 
is not limited to one mode of action, life may 
exist under such diversities of aspect as are 
often perfectly incomprehensible, but still per- 
fectly real. If I were a chemist, I should say 
that the aerolites, evidently not belonging to our 



ARVAN'S PLATFORM, 283 

world, Still reveal to analysis undeniable traces 
of carbon in such a state as to prove, accord- 
ing to Reichenbach, that it was once either the 
food or the habitation of organized beings. 
But I am neither a scientific man, nor a 
naturalist, nor a chemist. Therefore, in my 
profound ignorance of the great laws governing 
the universe, I shall restrict myself to saying : 
I don't know whether the other worlds are 
inhabited or not, and as I don't know, I am 
going to see !'' 

These words were hailed with such hearty ac- 
clamations and prolonged cheers that the lit- 
erary gentleman in the crowd asked no further 
questions — whether from a conviction of their 
inutility or from the satisfaction he had de- 
rived from the reply, it is now impossible to 
state. The probability is that the uproarious 
cheers and senseless applause of the outsiders 
continued so long that he adjourned further 
scientific inquiries to a more favorable moment. 

Ardan soon resumed, the immense crowd com- 
ing to a dead hush as soon as he opened his 
lips : 

*^ Of course, my friends, you understand that 
such a great question I only glance at, not 
enter upon. I am no famous Star Course lec- 



284 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB 

turer, exuding knowledge from every pore of 
his body at five hundred dollars a night, before 
a crowd of ladies and gentlemen seated at their 
ease and perfectly willing that somebody else 
should do their thinking. I am no learned 
professor surrounded with costly apparatus of 
the latest fashion, and attended by one or two 
dozen assistants doing all the hard work while 
he does all the easy talk. I am no orator, 
any more than one of yourselves, but a ''plain, 
blunt man,'* according to the expression of your 
own Shakspeare, or, as we always enthusiasti- 
cally call him in France, the '' Divine Wil- 
liams !'' 

The sudden fit of merriment that here shook 
the audience they did all they could to conceal 
by hemming, coughing, nose-blowing, etc., and 
even Barbican*s grim features relaxed for an 
instant into a humorous smile. But the orator 
continued his discourse, evidently unconscious 
of the enormous success of his hit : 

'' Of all the many arguments that can be 
brought forward to sustain the habitability of 
the other worlds, I shall allude to one only, 
as that one, if not quite as conclusive as the 
others, is simple and within the comprehension 
of the humblest. To Doctor Whewell and the 



ARDAN'S PLATFORM, 285 

Other Star-smashers who deny the possibility of 
the planets being inhabited, I would say : 
Gentlemen, you may be right in your posi- 
tion, if you can only prove that the earth is 
the best of all possible worlds. But she is 
nothing of the kind. Far from it. In the 
simple question of satellites alone she is far in- 
ferior to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. 
They have a great number at their service, she 
has but one. But the strongest objection to 
the optimism of our Earth is the great inclina- 
tion of her axis to her orbit. This causes the 
variation of our seasons, I admit, but that is pre- 
cisely why I blame it. Variation of the seasons 
is no advantage. Inequality in the length of our 
days and nights is no advantage. Approaching 
extremes in the heat of our summers and the 
cold of our winters is no advantage. We are 
alternately freezing or roasting. This planet of 
ours is par excellence the planet of colds, 
rheumatisms, coughs and catarrhs. But if you 
want to see a planet really worthy of the name, 
look at Jupiter ! His axis being inclined only 
about 3°, his inhabitants can enjoy zones of 
invariable temperature the whole year round. 
They have their countries of perpetual spring, 
perpetual summer, perpetual autumn, and perpet- 



286 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

ual winter. Consequently, every Jovian^ by 
choosing whatever climate or seasons he finds 
to suit him best, can protect himself com- 
pletely against all possible variations of temper- 
ature. In this respect alone Jupiter enjoys such 
immense superiority over our planet that I need 
hardly allude to another one equally great — the 
length of his years, each one twelve times as 
long as ours. To me it seems that, living 
under such favorable auspices, under such ad- 
vantageous conditions of existence, the inhabi- 
tants of Jupiter must be a very superior order of 
beings. Their scholars must be more learned, 
their artists more masterly, their good people 
more excellent, and their bad ones less de- 
praved than with us. And what is it all owing 
to ? What does our world want in order to 
become the pink of all possible worlds ? Very 
little ! Only a slighter inclination of her axis 
to the plane of her orbit !'* 

*' That's so ! All as true as gospel !'' cried 
an impetuous voice. '^ But what is to prevent 
us from fixing it ? Let us go to work at once 
and construct a machine to straighten up the 
earth's axis ! What is it that Americans can't 
do if they only put their whole mind to it ?" 

Thunders of the most vociferous applause 



ARDAN'S PLATFORM, 287 

hailed this bold proposition which, of course, 
could emanate only from the slap-dash, fidgety, 
excitable brain of our friend J. T. Marston, 
who was always ready *^ to fly off the handle." 
The Secretary of the Gun Club was, in many 
respects, the type of a set of men who, though 
fortunately not very numerous in the Great 
Republic, are still to be found in every part of 
the country. Quick at catching an idea, but 
never improving on it ; ready at the tongue, 
but unable to control it ; abundant in mother 
wit, but apparently destitute of gumption ; ac- 
quainted with all the new books, but only skim- 
mers of their froth ; rapid at figures, which 
they innocently believe can never lie ; full of 
the last idea, never masters of it ; lynxes at 
the strong points of an analogy, bats at its weak 
ones ; ready to pronounce at the moment a dog- 
matic opinion on the most puzzling question 
in politics or religion, though utterly deficient 
in the cool judicial mind — such men are often 
found occupying important positions in the 
land, where they evidently exercise great influ- 
ence in the formation of public opinion. If 
wanting in the moral sense, they do more 
harm than all the rest of the politicians put 
together. If thoroughly honest, they are still 



288 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

more mischievous, by their proneness to *' fly off 
the handle/* as the popular phrase has it. 
Their reputation makes them respectable in the 
minds of the people, even when advocating ex- 
tremely radical views regarding ^* Woman's 
Rights,'' '' Maine Liquor Law,'' '' Elastic 
Currency," '' Credit Mobilier," '' Educational 
Bureau," '^ Contraction," '^ Inflation," and other 
ticklish questions, not to mention their desire to 
introduce changes into the Constitution, of an 
extremely doubtful utility. 

But Marston, so far, had done no harm what- 
ever, except what resulted from his famous Bal- 
timore experiment. His smartness had long be- 
fore this been so fully appreciated that his 
friends had run him for Governor of Pennsyl- 
vania, in which State he possessed considerable 
property. But his unthinking, outspoken hon- 
esty made his election hopeless. He would 
speak his mind on every conceivable subject, 
and fill all the newspapers with his communica- 
tions. His opponent, a man strongly similar 
in temperament, but less scrupulous and more ' 
cunning, or at least much more tractable in 
the hands of his backers, never uttered a word 
or touched a pen during the canvass. He was 
of course elected by a tremendous majority, but he 



ARDAN'S PLATFORM. 289 

has ever since been trying to indemnify himself 
for his period of forced silence, by giving full 
vent to his eloquence on every possible occasion. 

Marston's new notion, ^^ his latest kick," as 
a good natured friend called it, though quite on 
a par with all the others, was exactly the one 
to catch the popular fancy, excited as it was 
at the time by Ardan's novel audacities. To 
Barbican's delight, the whole meeting seemed 
to forget, for at least half an hour, every other 
question but that of ^^reconstructing" the earth's 
axis. They passed resolutions on the spot 
highly eulogistic of the idea, and appointed a 
committee of five, IMarston chairman, to find 
out the best locality for the erection of suitable 
engines, and to report progress at the next 
public meeting, which they were likewise em- 
powered to call. 

That meeting has never since been called. 
Marston's engines have been as unfortunate in 
finding a TIou Itcd as Archimedes' lever. Still 
I see by the New York papers that the ques- 
tion is by no means dropped. The committee 
hold their regular meetings, at which Marston's 
stream of eloquence, figures, speculations and 
poetry, gushes forth as hopefully, as abundantly, 
and apparently as inexhaustibly as ever. 
^9 



CHAPTER XX. 

A FENCING MATCH, 

Marston's sudden proposition, as said in our 
last chapter, occupied the attention of the as- 
sembly for some time to the exclusion of every 
other consideration. In fact, the meeting had 
every appearance of being about to break up 
after the appointment of the Committee of Five 
and the reading of the eulogistic resolutions. 
But just as, the general agitation being some- 
what calmed, somebody was on the point of 
proposing an adjournment, a loud clear voice 
with some asperity in its nasal twang, was heard 
to pronounce the following words : 

^* Now that the orator has given full swing 
to his fancy, perhaps he will have the kindness 
to return to the main question. We have had 
enough of the theoretic, will he not give us a 
little of the practical, side of his enterprise?*' 

All eyes were immediately directed towards 

the speaker. He was a tall, thin, elderly man ; 

his face was clean shaven except where a stiff 

goatee hung from his chin ; his sourish features 

(290) 



A FENCING MATCH. 291 

were full of energy ; and the gold spectacles 
could not hide the keen flash of his eyes. 
During the general confusion resulting from 
Marston's proposition, he had contrived to ap- 
proach the smaller platform reserved exclusively 
for the speakers, and now he stood in front 
of the high stage before the eyes of the assem- 
bly, within a few feet of Ardan's left hand, 
calmly waiting an answer, with arms folded 
and eyes fixed steadily on the Frenchman. 

Equally regardless of the thousands of angry 
glances shot at him, and of the thousands of 
angry murmurs excited by his unexpected ap- 
pearance, he once more repeated his question, 
clearly, precisely, and in even sourer tones ; 
then he added : 

" We are here, sir, to talk about the Moon, 
not about the Earth/' 

*' You are perfectly right, my dear sir," re- 
plied Ardan, recovering a little from his sur- 
prise ; ** we have wandered a little from the 
subject. Let us go back to the Moon." 

" Sir," resumed the stranger, '' you pretend 
that the Moon is inhabited. Now, those Selenite 
friends of yours must contrive to live without 
lungs, for, as you are aware, there is not a 
particle of air on the Moon's surface." 



292 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

At this Strong assertion, probing as it did 
the question in its vitalest point, Ardan sud- 
denly straightened himself up and eyed his 
antagonist keenly while he answered : 

^^ Indeed ! No air in the Moon ? Why not, 
pray ?*' 

^* Scientific men say so." 

^^They do?^' 

^^ Yes j in such precise and positive language 
as to show that they know what they are talk- 
ing about.*' 

^' My dear sir,** replied Ardan quietly, *' with- 
out meaning to be rude, I must say that for 
scientific men who really know something, I 
have the most profound esteem, but for those 
who only imagine they know something, I en- 
tertain nothing but the most profound con- 
tempt.** 

" Do you know any of those belonging to 
the latter class?'* 

'^ Too many; not a few of them seem to think 
that the profoundest knowledge consists in de- 
nying the simplest truth. I know a great 
scientist in France who proves by an incontro- 
vertible mathematical demonstration that a bird 
can*t fly. I know another who can show con- 
clusively that a fish is not made for water.** 



A F£NCL\G MATCH, 293 

'' I don't speak of such simpletons, sir ; I 
can cite in support of my assertions the opin- 
ions of scientific men of world wide reputation 
for the depth and soundness of their knowl- 
edge." 

'^ My dear sir, I shall be only too happy to 
hear what they have^ got to say. A poor ig- 
norant fellow like me is always ready to take 
his lesson." 

'^ Ignorant ! What business has an ignorant 
man to approach scientific questions ?" asked 
the stranger somewhat roughly. *^ Why should 
he do it?" 

*' Why ? Why is he the bravest man who 
never suspects danger ? I am ignorant, it is 
true, but my honest ignorance often carries me 
further than another man's fancied knowledge." 

'^ Your ignorance, I admit can carry you 
very far," growled the unknown, loud enough 
to be heard. 

** I shall be quite satisfied if it carries me to 
the Moon !" 

^^ The very place fit for you!" muttered the 
unknown, in a low but angry voice. 

Since the beginning of the debate, the Presi- 
dent and his colleagues of the Gun Club had 
been devouring with eager eyes this bold in- 



294 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

truder, whose inopportune questioning might 
seriously block the progress of their enterprise. 
Nobody seemed to know who he was, but Bar- 
bican had his surmises, and he was therefore 
doubly apprehensive regarding Ardan, who, so 
far, certainly did not seem to be getting the 
best of it. The assembly had been very atten- 
tive to the discussion, but it was now evidently 
becoming somewhat restless at the idea of hear- 
ing something unpleasant regarding the dangers 
or the actual impossibilities of the great enter- 
prise. 

** Sir," resumed Ardan's opponent, " argu- 
ments numerous and irrefutable prove the total 
absence of all atmosphere on the Moon's sur- 
face. I might assert that, even if such an at- 
mosphere ever existed, it must have been drawn 
off long ago by the earth. But, instead of as- 
sertions, I prefer to adduce facts, sir; incontro- 
vertible facts !*' 

** Adduce them, my dear sir, by all means," 
said Ardan, in his most polished style ; ** let 
us have the facts." 

'* Of course you are aware," replied the 
stranger, *^ that rays of light traversing a dense 
medium, like the air, deviate a little from a 
straight line, or, in other words, undergo refrac- 



A FENCING MATCH. 295 

tion. Now, when the stars are occulted by 
the Moon, their rays, however closely they 
may graze her disc, never experience the least 
deviation, never show the slightest semblance 
of refraction. The evident conclusion from 
this is clearly that the Moon has no atmos- 
phere/* 

Every one looked nervously at the French- 
man ; the facts once admitted, the consequences 
were rigorous. 

^* Well,** replied Ardan, '^ that is your best, 
probably your only argument, and a scientific 
man might have some difficulty in answering 
it. In my eyes, however, it has no value, as 
it takes for granted that the angular diameter 
of the j\Ioon is perfectly determined, which is 
by no means the case. But let this pass for 
a moment, and answer me one question. Do 
you admit the existence of volcanoes in the 
Moon ?'* 

^' Volcanoes extinct, yes ; volcanoes active, 
no.** 

'^ They must have been active, however, at 
some period or other?'* 

*^ Of course ; but as they might have fur- 
nished themselves with the oxygen necessary 
for combustion, the fact of their eruption by 



296 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

no means proves the existence of a lunar at- 
mosphere.*' 

^' They might," replied Ardan, smiling, ''and 
then again they mightn't. Conjecture proves 
nothing. Let us leave it altogether, and take 
to direct observation. I give you warning. I 
am going to lug in great names too." 

*' Lug them in !" 

''In 1 715, two astronomers, Louville in 
France and Halley in England, while observ- 
ing a lunar eclipse, remarked on the surface cer- 
tain glimmerings of a curious nature, resemb- 
ling distant lightning flashes. They could ac- 
count for them no other way than as signs of 
some terrible storms raging in the Moon." 

"In 1 715," replied the stranger, "Louville 
and Halley made a great blunder. They took 
mere terrestrial for lunar phenomena. The light- 
ning flashes that they saw, were nothing but 
little meteors flying about in the upper regions 
of our own atmosphere." 

" All right !" replied Ardan, no way discon- 
certed at this reply ; "let us again pass on. 
Did not Herschel, in 1787, observe more than a 
hundred and fifty luminous points on the Moon's 
surface ?" 

" He thought so, at least ; but he offered no 



A FENCING MATCH, 297 

explanation to account for them ; they never in- 
duced him to believe in a lunar atmosphere/* 

'* Well answered/' replied Ardan ; *^ I must 
really compliment you, my dear sir, on being so 
well up in selenography/' 

*^ Thank you ;'* replied the stranger dryly, 
*' compliments are all very well, but I like ar- 
guments better ! Shall I quote you the opin- 
ions of Beer and Maedler, the great lunar map 
constructors ? They are very decidedly opposed 
to yours/' 

A thrill of anxiety ran through the assembly 
at each reply made by the stranger. He was 
evidently making some hits. But Ardan was far 
from being a beaten man. 

*^ Their opinions?" he repeated with an arch 
smile. ^' No, thank you ; opinions are all very 
well, but I like arguments better ! (Laughter 
and cries of good !) My dear sir, I don't care 
a straw for any man's opinion as long as I have 
facts to form one for myself. Once for all 
then, let us drop opinions and come to one or 
two very important facts. Laussedat, a French 
astronomer, when observing the famous solar 
eclipse of July i8th, i860, saw that the horns 
or cusps of the sun's crescent, instead of being 
sharp, well defined, and coming to a point, 



298 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

were truncated, jagged and blunt. Now, how 
is it possible to account for this very remark- 
able phenomenon any other way than by the 
refraction and even the absorption of the sun's 
rays as they passed through the lunar atmos- 
phere?'* 

^^ But did Laussedat really make such an ob- 
servation ?'* asked the stranger quickly and with 
some uneasiness. 

^^ Really, truly and absolutely," replied Ar- 
dan ; ** I can refer you to the volume of the 
Comptes Rendus of the Academic des Sciences 
and probably to the very page on which it is 
recorded.*' 

At this reply the stranger was evidently dis- 
concerted, and for a few minutes could not utter 
a word. The audience withheld their hearty 
cheers at Ardan's triumph only because they 
saw that their favorite had not yet quite fin- 
ished. 

** I need not allude to Bailey's Beads^^^ he 
continued, ^^ which are so difficult to explain, 
without supposing the existence of an atmosphere, 
nor to Schroeter's Lunar Twilights, pointing al- 
most irresistibly to the same conclusion, I cite 
these absolutely observed facts to show you that 
nobody should be in a hurry to decide that the 



A FENCING MATCH, 299 

Moon has no atmosphere. Its atmosphere, it is 
true, may not be very dense, it may even be 
very rare, but its norn-existence is far from 
proven, and therefore should not be positively 
asserted." 

^' It certainly does not exist on the moun- 
tains,'* said the stranger, unwilling to give 
in. 

*^ On the summit of our Himalayas," replied 
Ardan readily, '* the air no doubt is exceed- 
ingly subtile. But should we therefore conclude 
that there is no atmosphere on the earth ? Yet 
that is the strongest argument your scientific 
men adduce against the existence of one on 
the Moon ! As I said before, I respect 
highly the scientific men that know something, 
but I regard with very different feelings those 
who try to pass off their crude conjectures and 
flimsy fancies for profound knowledge. A nega- 
tive proposition is the most difiicult of all to 
prove, and your scientific men have a good deal 
yet to do before they can convince people that 
the Moon has no atmosphere." 

A formidable shout of applause greeted Ardan*s 
triumph, but his opponent, though disconcerted 
a little, was far from being dismayed, and still 
calmly surveyed the vast assembly. Ardan re- 



300 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

sumed, but quietly and without the air of desir- 
ing to press his advantage too much : 

** Since we cannot deny the existence of a 
certain amount of atmosphere in the Moon, we 
are likewise obliged to admit the presence of a 
certain quantity of water. Besides, my dear sir, 
I must call your attention to another point. We 
know only one side of the Moon's surface. 
There may be but little air on the face pre- 
sented to us, but how can we tell that there is 
not quite an abundance on the opposite side?" 

^' Why should we think so?" 

^^ Well, as you are so fond of scientific men's 
opinions, I shall give you some. Professor Gus- 
sen, of Wilna, after a careful examination of the 
best Lunar photographs, has come to the con- 
clusion that the Moon is egg-shaped, with its 
smiall end drawn towards us by the attraction of 
the earth. Professor Hansen, an astronomer of 
such celebrity that the British Government pub- 
lished his Moon Tables a few years ago, follow- 
ing up Gussen's idea, has calculated the Lunar 
centre of gravity to be in the external hemis- 
phere. If this be so, the paucity of both at- 
mosphere and water on the Moon's visible sur- 
face is easily accounted for. They have been 
all attracted to the other side, where they accu- 



A FENCING MATCH. 301 

mulate in dense masses in accordance with well 
known principles of gravitation." 

*^ All twaddle and fudge!" cried the stranger 
angrily. 

'^ Twaddle and fudge, as you say, such opin- 
ions may very truly be/' replied Ardan coolly, 
'^ but, nevertheless, as they are founded on ob- 
servation and calculation, they can be refuted 
only by the same means." 

Loud applause greeted this ready reply. The 
meeting, in fact, was becoming quite jubilant, 
and, now seeing that the stranger was coming 
off second best, it began to treat him with de- 
cided disrespect. He tried to speak, but they 
would not listen to him. The more he per- 
sisted, the louder they roared, and he soon 
heard himself saluted with the refined wit so 
common on such occasions : 

'^ Dry up and bust. Old Spectacles !" cried 
some. 

^^ Take a back seat, Old AVhite Hat!" cried 
others. 

'^ Go West, young man, go West !" came 
from the right. 

^' Change your base, General !" came from 
the left. 

*' Put him out ! Put him out !" roared the 



302 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

multitude at large, beginning to be tired of the 
scene. 

But instead of being cowed by the storm rag- 
ing around him, the stranger actually shook his 
stick at the yelling mob. Ardan, by some em- 
phatic gesticulation, at last succeeded in some- 
what calming the excited multitude, and, taking 
advantage of a lull in the storm, he addressed 
his unknown antagonist : 

*^ Perhaps you desire to make a few more 
remarks ?'* 

*^ A few more ? A thousand more 1" re- 
plied the stranger in a voice trembling with 
rage. '* But no! — further talk in such a pan- 
demonium as this, would be mere waste of 
breath. I shall only say that if you persist in 
the idea of starting for the Moon in a conical 
cylinder, you must be the craziest simpleton 
living.** 

*' A simpleton 1 He calls me a simpleton for 
proposing to go to the Moon in a conical cylin- 
der ! Would you have me start in a spherical 
shell, where I should never stop turning head 
over heels like a squirrel in a cage ? In a coni- 
cal cylinder I shall always stand upright and go 
perfectly straight to the mark. Yet for this lu- 
minous idea I am called a simpleton !*' 



A FENCING MATCH, 303 

'* But, you great baby, the tremendous con- 
cussion at the very start will be alone sufficient 
to dash you into a thousand pieces 1" 

** My dear friend,'* replied Ardan, somewhat 
seriously, ^^ you have put your finger at last on 
the real and only difficulty. That it is a 
serious one I do not deny, but I have too 
much confidence in the mechanical genius of 
my American friends to entertain the least 
doubt of their thorough ability to overcome it.'* 

** Then, the enormous heat developed by the 
projectile as it rushes through the various 
layers of the atmosphere !" 

*' Oh ! The walls are thick and I shall be 
only a few seconds getting through fifty miles. 
There won't be time enough to get roasted 
in !" 

'^ But provisions ! Water ?" 

** I shall take enough for a year, and my 
trip will last but five days !" 

** And the air to breathe in the mean- 
time ?" 

*' I can make as much air as I like with 
chemicals.'* 

'' But the shock of your fall on the Moon's 
surface, if you ever get there !'* 

'* It will be six times less violent than a fall 



304 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

on the earth, the Moon's attraction being six 
times weaker/' 

^^ Still it will be violent enough to splinter 
you like glass into a thousand fragments !" 

^* What shall prevent me from breaking the 
fall by means of counteracting rockets suitably 
disposed and let off at the proper time ?'* 

^^ But — well — in short, supposing all the diffi- 
culties gotten over, all the obstacles conquered, 
and that you had arrived safe and sound at 
your journey's end — how could you get back?" 

^^ I don't intend to come back !" 

At the sublime simplicity of this reply, the 
whole assembly was actually struck dumb. A 
dead silence, infinitely more expressive than the 
most enthusiastic exclamations, lasted for a few 
seconds. The stranger took advantage of it to 
make a last appeal. 

*^ You will assuredly lose your life," he cried, 
^^ and your death, though it leaves one mad- 
man less in the world, will be of no other ad- 
vantage to science." 

^^ Prognosticate, my dear boy, prognosticate ! 
Your cheerful predictions please -you and do me 
no harm !" 

'^ Can't you be in earnest for a moment ?" 
cried the stranger passionately. ^* But, in fact, 



A FENCLVG MATCH. 305 

you're not so wrong in acting the jester regard- 
ing such a mad subject. I must be crazy my- 
self to talk seriously even for a moment about 
it. Go to the Moon, or go to the — Halifax, 
if you want to ! I wash my hands out of the 
whole thing. I wish others could do the same ! 
You're not the one I blame most for it !" 

^* You're very kind !" 

'^ Yes ; whatever may be the consequence of 
the silly piece of business no one will ever 
hold yo7i responsible for it." 

^^ Really ? I am not responsible for my own 
acts ! Who is, pray ?" 

'* The cowardly and shallow pretender that 
was the first to start a notion as absurd as it 
is ridiculous !" cried the stranger, in a voice 
loud enough to be heard by half the meeting. 

The blow was direct and its animus unmistak- 
able. Ever since the stranger's first appearance. 
Barbican had been making the most violent 
efforts to restrain himself, *^ to consume his 
own gas," as the stove makers say, but this 
public insult at once exploded him. Forgetting 
everything in the violence of his fury, he 
jumped from his seat, shook his fist at his an- 
tagonist and ^^ went for him.'' The stranger, 
evidently expecting something of the kind, 



306 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

stood on his guard. A violent collision seemed 
inevitable, fraught with heaven knows what 
consequences, when, all at once. Barbican found 
himself compelled, whether he liked it or not, 
to put off his deadly vengeance for a more 
favorable occasion. 

We have already spoken of the small square 
stage — accessible by a few steps attaching it 
to the centre of the platform — which, enabling 
the speakers to come a little more forward, 
allowed them to be more easily seen and heard 
by the Gun Club men seated in rows behind. 
Before Barbican had time to descend the steps, 
this stage was forcibly detached from the plat- 
form by the vigorous arms of some admiring 
enthusiasts, who would be satisfied with nothing 
less than bearing Ardan and Barbican in grand 
ovation back to the city. The triumphal 
chariot was very heavy, difficult to balance, 
and exceedingly awkward to carry, but the 
broad shoulders made nothing of such trifles, 
"^and applicants for the honor were in such 
abundance that the right of precedence could 
not be settled in several instances without re- 
course to blows. 

Marston jumped down and ran after his 
friends, but the stranger still maintained his 



A FENCING MATCH, 307 

post on the platform, gazing at the disappear- 
ing Barbican, who, for his part, in spite of the 
difficulties and inconveniences of his position, 
continued to shoot glances of the deadliest 
hatred at his adversary as long as he continued 
in sight. Could eyes kill, most assuredly these 
two men would have dropped dead then and 
there, shot through the brain by way of the 
optic nerve. This is only another illustration of 
the old Latin proverb regarding the savage 
hatred of scientific men : 

Odium ignorantum 
Est odium infantum • 

Sed odium Doctorum 
Est odium ferorum. 

Which may be thus rendered : 

When ignorance ignorance offends, 
The boyish quarrel quickly ends 5 

But only let your Sauants fight — 

Not grizzly bears more fiercely bite ! 

The triumphal procession was a splendid suc- 
cess. The most rapturous acclamations greeted 
the conquering heroes as they advanced, and 
the cheers were so frequent and animated 
along the route as to seem one great con- 
tinuous uninterrupted cry. The streets were 
gay with flags, and the ladies and children 



308 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

made the house-fronts alive with waving hand- 
kerchiefs. 

Ardan enjoyed it intensely. His face radi- 
ated with smiles, and the air with which he 
bowed right and left to the vast multitude was 
grace itself. Not that he had not occasionally 
extreme difficulty to maintain the perpendicular, 
on account of the peculiar nature of the impro- 
vised triumphal chariot. Sometimes two short 
men would get hold of the front legs while 
two very tall men held the hind legs ; some 
times the two short men were on the right and 
the two very tall men were on the left ; the 
best of times the floor was far from level, and 
the triumphal car would pitch and roll and 
toss and lurch like a ship in a chopping swell. 
But our heroes had splendid sea legs ; if they 
did not always maintain an attitude rigidly ver- 
tical, they at least managed to escape being 
washed overboard, and their good ship at last 
safely came to anchor in the friendly port of 
Tampa. 

It was so dark by the time they arrived in 
front of their hotel, that, by suddenly swinging 
themselves off the stage and mingling with the 
crowd, they easily managed to escape further 
inconvenient attention from their admirers. Ar- 



A FENCING MATCH, 309 

dan stole up to his room, bolted his door, bar- 
ricaded it with the furniture, and was soon fast 
asleep, though the crowds kept shouting under 
his windows till midnight, and were then suc- 
ceeded by the German bands, who serenaded him 
till half-past three in the morning. 

In the meantime, a short, sharp and decisive 
scene took place between the mysterious stran- 
ger and the President of the Gun Club. Instead 
of seeking his room. Barbican had immediately 
retraced his steps back to the place of meeting, 
expecting to find his adversary still standing on 
the platform. But he could see nobody there 
but the workmen, who, lantern in hand, were 
busily engaged in taking down the poles and 
rolling up the canvas. Greatly disappointed, 
he returned to his hotel, but the very first man 
he noticed there, talking to the clerk and proba- 
bly inquiring about himself, bore the well re- 
membered features of his adversary. A light 
tap on the shoulder, accompanied by a signifi- 
cant glance, was understood in an instant. 

Making their way as rapidly as they could 
through the crowded streets, the two enemies 
soon found themselves standing at the extreme 
end of a lonely wharf, not far from where the 
Atlanta lay at anchor. They glanced at each 



310 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

Other for a few minutes without saying a word. 
The silence was first broken by Barbican. 

'' You are Captain McNicholl, of Philadel- 
phia ?'* 

" Yes/' 

^' We met to-day for the first time." 

'' Not my fault !'' 

** You have insulted me !'' 

" Deliberately !" 

^' You are ready to give satisfaction ?'* 

*' Instant and complete !'* 

^' Here we should be interrupted. We were 
watched at the hotel." 

'' Arrange it as you like." 

'^ Do you insist on seconds ?" 

'^No." 

'' A few miles northwest of us is a wood sur- 
rounded by meadows bare of timber. Do you 
know it?" 

'' I can find it." 

'' To-morrow morning at six o'clock will you 
enter its eastern end?" 

'^ As surely as you enter its western end." 

<^ Bring your best rifle." 

*^ Don't forget yours." 

With these words, grim, cool, and determined 
. as themselves, the foes separated. 



A FENCIXG MATCH. 311 

Barbican returned to his hotel, but, instead of 
taking a few hours ' rest after a most exciting day, 
he spent the remainder of the night in trying to 
find the means of counteracting the frightful con- 
cussion of the projectile at the instant of its de- 
parture — the serious problem alluded to by ^Ic- 
Xicholl, and on his successful solution of which 
Ardan had confidently counted. 



CHAPTER XXI. 

WAR TO THE KNIFE I 

We left Ardan fast asleep in spite of the 
noise that surrounded him. Perhaps even the 
shouts of the impatient multitudes under his 
windows and the endless serenades of seven 
different bands had only excited his somno- 
lency j for certain it is that, as soon as the 
reddening east told the last crowd of exhaust- 
less Teutons that it was time to go home, his 
slumbers became less sound and his dreams 
more disturbed. He imagined that he had at 
last reached the Moon, but that, instead of 
alighting on the plains, the projectile had de- 
scended on the summit of a hill with such 
force as to bury itself two or three hundred 
feet below the surface. The shock had extin- 
guished his light, broken his instruments, and 
thrown everything into the greatest confusion. 
He had already passed two days in profound 
darkness and dead silence, perfectly miserable 
and ravenously hungry (he had eaten nothing 

since noon). Completely helpless, he was at last 
{312) 



IVAJi TO THE KNIFE, 313 

quietly resigning himself to his fate, when, all 
at once, he heard a faint tapping at the upper 
end of the projectile. Some good Selenites per- 
haps coming to his rescue ! He shouted to let 
them know he was alive, and the tapping be- 
came louder. They were evidently approaching. 
Louder yet. He heard them talking ! Louder 
yet ! He could even distinguish their words : 
'* Open, open, for the love of heaven !*' At last, 
the tapping grew so loud that it awoke him. 

But his dream was not all a dream, for, sure 
enough, somebody in the entry was knocking 
loudly at his door and crying with an anxious 
earnest voice : 

" Open ! open, for the love of heaven !*' 

He jumped up at once and began pulling 
away the barricade from the door ; this was 
soon forced open, and Marston burst into the 
room like a bombshell, capering with excitement 
and consternation. 

^' Oh ! Ardan,*' he cried without further 
ceremony, ^^ Barbican was insulted last evening 
at the meeting, as you know, but who it was 
you don't know. It was McNicholl of Phila- 
delphia, his deadly enemy ! Of course he chal- 
lenged him, and they are now fighting a Ken- 
tucky duel in the St. Helena Wood. I learned 



314 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

it all through a note of Barbican's, which by 
a lucky accident was handed to me two hours 
before its time. If the President is killed your 
Moon trip is all gone up !" 

^^ Gone up where?" asked Ardan. in some 
confusion, not understanding all the niceties of 
the American language. 

'^ I mean the whole project is gone to smash, 
unless this duel is prevented. There is only 
one man in this world can stop Barbican once 
he has made up his mind, and, Ardan, that 
man is you !'* 

While Marston was speaking, Ardan was dress- 
ing, and in less than five minutes the two 
friends were tearing out of Tampa by the Fort 
Brooke road as fast as ever their legs could 
carry them. 

The Secretary soon made the Frenchman com- 
plete master of the situation. He told him that 
though the real cause of the enmity between 
Barbican and McNicholl was of old date, chance 
and common friends had so arranged it that 
the foes had never before met face to face. As 
the real cause of the trouble was the rivalry 
between armor and ball, he had no doubt that 
the scene of the previous evening had been 
contrived by McNicholl, who was dying for an 



IVAK TO THE KNIFE, 315 

opportunity to vent his spleen. Then Marston 
told his friend something about the nature of 
the fight which they were hurrying to prevent. 

This terrible species of duel, so common in 
the South and West thirty or forty years ago, 
is not yet, unhappily, quite extinct. Barbican 
and McNicholl understood it to perfection. 
Each was to go into the forest armed as he 
pleased, and was allowed to fight as he pleased, 
every trick, wile, or deceit employed to kill 
the enemy being considered perfectly lawful. 
Once engaged in such a duel, you could no 
more expect mercy or generosity from your 
enemy than from a tiger or a coppersnake or, 
worse still, from a savage Seminole tracked to 
death. Mere animal courage counted very lit- 
tle in your favor. The qualities of mind and 
body developed by a life long struggle for ex- 
istence in a wild forest, where death lurks 
under a thousand forms — marvellous keenness of 
eye and ear and nose, rapid fertility in expedients 
and resources, ready ingenuity in throwing the 
enemy off the scent, unerring sagacity in follow- 
ing up his trail, skilful manoeuvring so as to 
draw his fire on some ^^ blind," the wonderful 
control of nerve which enables you to lie motion- 
less for hours in an uncomfortable position 



316 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

when you think you have the advantage — these 
and other qualities of a similar nature were evi- 
dently of infinitely more account than mere 
animal courage. The slightest blunder, mistake 
or hesitation almost inevitably proved fatal, 

'* What perfect fiends you American fellows 
are !" cried Ardan, shuddering, as he listened 
to some details that would make your blood 
run cold. 

^^ Well we ain't anything else !" replied 
Marston quite complacently. ^' I tell you what, 
when we're riled we can make the fur fly, and 
no mistake about it. But let us hurry up or we 
shall be too late." 

^^ I'm afraid we are too late anyhow," ob- 
served Ardan, redoubling his speed after a short 
relaxation to take breath. 

They had by this time left Tampa far behind 
them, and as they hurried over a flat plain 
covered with sea grass wet with dew, and 
crossed by several shallow creeks, they could 
easily catch sight of the ^^ St. Helena Wood," 
skirting the edge of the plain at a distance of 
at least two miles. It was now half past six 
o'clock ; if the duel had begun at six, by this 
time all was probably decided for ever. They 
saw a colored man at some distance before 



JVAR TO THE KNIFE, 317 

them, driving a loaded wagon drawn by four 
horses. 

*' Hello?'' cried Marston, a hundred yards off. 

*' Hello !'* answered the man. 

*^ Come from the woods ?'* 

'* Yes, Boss ; from the saw mill.*' 

^' Did you see my friend Barbican there ?" 

^' How's that. Boss ?" 

'^ I mean, did you see a sportsman — armed 
with a rifle, you know?'* 

** Yes, two of them. Boss.*' 

''Together?'* 

*' No ; in two different parts of the wood." 

'' How long ago ?'* 

*' More than an hour.*' 

'' Did you hear any firing ?*' asked Ardan, 
who had now come up. 

*' No, Boss ; nary fire.** 

'' Sure?'* 

*' Sartain, Boss. Funny sports ! Yanks, I 
reckon. Ya ! ya ! Git along, Joe !'* and on 
he went smacking his whip, and laughing heartily 
at the idea of a man being in St. Helena Wood 
for an hour without getting a shot. 

Off they started again at full speed, but were 
obliged to stop a few hundred yards from the 
wood to take breath. 



318 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

^'What's to be done now?'' asked Marston, 
when his companion had come near enough to 
talk to. 

*' Hard to say/' replied Ardan. ^' If we enter 
the wood, it is at the risk of getting a bullet in 
the brain." 

^' I don't mind that," said the faithful Mars- 
ton. ^* I would risk ten bullets in the brain to 
save Barbican." 

** All right, then, dear boy!" cried Ardan, 
warmly shaking his hand. *' Go ahead ! You'll 
find no skulking about me, or ' backing out ' as 
you Americans call it." 

In a few minutes they were making their way 
through the dense underwood that skirted the 
forest, and a half-hour's struggling brought them 
into the heart of St. Helena Wood. The vege- 
tation was of the usual semi-tropical character. 
Gigantic cypresses, sycamores, palmettoes, limes, 
sweet and wild olive trees, tulip trees, tamarinds, 
pecans, live-oaks, and magnolias grew in such 
dense array and interwove their branches so 
closely that advancing was very hard work, and 
seeing ahead was actually impossible. Marston 
and his companion pushed on in Indian file, but 
on account of the obstacles presented by twining 
vines and luxuriant undergrowth, they had to 



}FAR TO THE KNIFE. 319 

change their course so often that they soon com- 
pletely lost their way. For some time they wan- 
dered on at random, looking every now and 
then for some broken branch to tell of a human 
being having been there before them, and rather 
nervously expecting to hear every moment the 
crack of a rifle. Ardan, who, like most Euro- 
peans, had taken all his ideas of American for- 
est life from Cooper's novels, was innocent 
enough to think that he might strike a trail by 
means of his reminiscences of '' Leather Stock- 
ing,** but Marston soon convinced him that the 
tactics of northern Indians would not work in a 
southern jungle, and, in fact, that a Kentucky duel 
was altogether out of place in a Florida forest. 

After an hour or two's fruitless labor, the 
friends, tired, torn and dispirited, came to a halt 
under the shadow of an immense live-oak. 

*^ It's all over, I'm sure," said Marston de- 
spondingly. '^ Barbican' s gone up 1 Bold as 
a lion, and smart ! — smart is no name for him 
— he was as simple and straight-forward as a 
child. He would disdain to stoop to any of 
your Indian tricks. He went for his enemy fair 
and square, and that darkey was too far off to 
hear the shot that killed him." 

^* Not likely;" said Ardan, *^ and certain it 



320 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

is that no shot has been fired since we have 
been here/' 

** Oh ! weVe come too late !'' exclaimed 
Marston, yielding to his despair. ^^ Good bye, 
Barbican ! Green be the sod above thee, friend 
of my early days!'* he continued in doleful tones 
interrupted with sobs, whilst tears streamed down 
his cheeks. 

Ardan's only reply was to call out as loud as 
he could : 

** Barbican ! McNicholl ! Mac Nich — oil ! 
Bar — bi — can — n — n !'' 

Flocks of birds, startled at the unusual sound, 
flew away through the branches, twittering and 
screaming in their fright ; wild cats and ocelots 
rushed across the clearing with a scared glance 
and an angry growl ; rattlesnakes, '^ coach- 
whips,'* and copperheads showed their glittering 
eyes for an instant amidst the surrounding foli- 
age, and then rapidly wriggled away through the 
dried leaves ; but no welcome human voice in 
reply saluted the listening ear. They shouted 
again and again j they heard nothing but the* 
faint echo of their own voices feebly reverberated 
by the gloomy depths of the primeval forest. 

They started once more, keeping the straightest 
line they could, and in considerably less than 



n^'AR TO THE KNIFE. 321 

an hour they found themselves outside the wood 
on the north side. Having entered by the south 
side, they saw that the forest could not be very 
large, and this gave them new hope. Entering 
again, they tried to follow a southeast course, 
shouting, beating the bushes, and making just 
as much noise as ever they could. Once more 
they came to the edge of the wood without see- 
ing anything. Over the plains to the south 
they could catch a glimpse of the United States 
flag waving in Fort Brooke, but that was the 
only sign suggestive of humanity that they could 
discover. Ardan, in his turn, tired and dis- 
couraged, began to fear the worst, but Marston, 
before giving up altogether, proposed a new ex- 
ploration, this time in a northwesterly course, so 
that no portion of the woods should be left un- 
searched. 

Resuming their course in perfect silence — too 
dispirited and tired to shout, they had not ad- 
vanced more than a few hundred paces when 
Marston suddenly stopped. 

'^ Hush !*' he whispered, '^ I see something 
over there to the left.'* 

** Something like a man ?'* asked Ardan. 

*^ Yes it is a man ! He is perfectly motion- 
less. He has no rifle either.'* 



322 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

*^ Who is he? Can't you tell?" asked Ardan, 
trying to fix his eye glasses. 

*^ Hush ! He is turning this way ! — Yes ! 
It's the man with the spectacles that catechised 
you yesterday !" 

*' McNicholl !" cried Ardan with a sudden 
pang in the heart that almost stopped its beat- 
ing. 

McNicholl without his rifle ! No longer 
afraid of . his enemy ! Then their worst suspi- 
cions were confirmed. 

^' Let us speak to him at once/' whispered 
Marston. '^ This suspense will kill me." 

They had not gone far before they stopped 
again to examine the Captain more attentively. 
Was that really the terrible duellist, implacable 
in his resentment, thirsting for the heart' s-blood 
of his enemy, aud now gloating savagely over 
his fearful vengeance ? 

He certainly did not look like it ! 

Amazement kept Marston and his companion 
riveted to the spot. 

A net, with meshes close and strong, had been 
spread from one immense tulip tree to another, 
and it now hung between both like a beautiful 
screen of silver wire work. In the middle of 
it, a poor little bird had got hopelessly entan- 



IVAR TO THE KNIFE, 323 

gled by the wings, and was now making its 
last efforts to escape, uttering the most pitiful 
cries. The hunter who had set this terrible 
trap from which there was no escape, was no 
human being, but a venemous spider of the 
tarantula species peculiar to the country, big 
as a pigeon^s tgg, hairy all over, and provided 
with enormous claws. The hideous animal had 
been just in the act of pouncing on his prey, 
when he was suddenly obliged to change front 
and seek safety in the higher branches of the 
tulip tree, being assailed in his turn by a for- 
midable enemy. 

The fact is, McNicholl, notwithstanding a 
temper compounded of vinegar and vitriol, was 
in reality such a kind hearted man that he 
had been made Vice President of the Phila- 
delphia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to 
Animals. He had entered the wood, breathing 
fire and fury, and if he had met Barbican any 
moment during the first half hour, the death 
of one or both would have been the inevitable 
result. But as he did not meet him, and as it 
was most unlikely that he ever would meet him 
in such a labyrinthine forest, he began to look 
around, and being an intense lover of nature, 
he soon found himself keenly interested in 



324 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

the various forms of animal life disclosed at 
every turn. It was not long until he had 
forgotten Barbican, armour, projectile, Moon, 
and all, so completely that he took the great- 
est amusement in throwing nuts at- the squirrels, 
frightening off the wild cats from the rabbits, 
and killing the rattlesnakes that he saw climb- 
ing up the trees after birds' nests. While 
Marston and Ardan were watching him, he was 
completely absorbed in trying to extricate, with 
the gentlest of hands, the poor, timid, fluttering 
little creature, which, probably thrown into new 
ecstacies of terror by the efforts of her deliverer, 
was doing all she could to render his task more 
difficult. But he succeeded at last, and threw 
the little thing high up into the air ; she fell 
back for an instant as if stunned, but soon find- 
ing herself at liberty, she shook her wings with 
joyful cries and in a moment vanished over 
the tree tops. 

The Captain was still looking in the direc- 
tion where she had disappeared, when he felt 
himself touched on the shoulder, and heard a 
voice full of emotion exclaim : 

*' McNicholl, you are a brave, noble man !*' 
Turning, he saw himself face to face with Ardan, 
who kept on repeating in every variety of tone : 



IFAJ^ TO IHE KNIFE, 325 

** A brave man ! A noble man ! A gentle 
man !'* 

** Ardan !*' cried the Captain, starting with 
surprise, ^' What are you doing here ?'* 

** Shaking your hand, Mac, my boy j and 
going to keep you from killing Barbican and 
him from killing you !" 

'' Barbican !" cried the Captain. ^' Oh ! I 
had forgotten all about him ! Where can the 
coward be hiding himself?" 

'* Coward ! Hiding !'* exclaimed Marston, 
blazing with indignation. ** Look out. Captain 
McNicholl ! My friend Barbican is as brave a 
man and as honorable a man as you are, and 
I will allow no one to traduce him in my 
presence !*' 

*' Marston is right !" interposed Ardan, be- 
fore the Captain could make an angry reply ; 
'' Mac, you are unjust in imputing anything 
like cowardice or meanness to your opponent. 
He is incapable of either. No, no, no ! Your 
bad temper must give way to your good heart ! 
Let us hunt up Barbican. I want to talk over a 
little notion of mine in the presence of you both." 

'^ Between Barbican and myself," replied the 
Captain with gloomy gravity, ** there is a dis- 
pute which death alone " 



326 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

*^ Come, come, Captain !*' interrupted Ardan, 
*' none of that ! As much jaw as you like, 
as much ink as you like, but no blood, no pow- 
der and ball, no shooting T' 

^* I'll shoot him as dead as a door nail the 
first chance I get ! I'll shoot him like a mad 
dog !" 

^' You will do nothing of the kind !** 

'* I'll draw as fine a bead on him as I would 
on a rattlesnake !" 

^^Look here, Captain McNicholl," said Marston 
with much quiet dignity, '^ your expressions 
a few moments ago, referring to my illustrious 
friend, betrayed a forgetfulness of manners, and 
they now reveal a ferocity of heart, altogether 
inconsistent with the demeanor of a gentleman ! 
I repeat the insult deliberately ! If you want 
any satisfaction take it at once ! I am ready 
to die any day in behalf of my noble friend 
Barbican. Fire away!" and he struck a grand 
attitude, folding his artificial arms magnificently 
over his manly bosom. 

*' Sir, sir !" cried the Captain, convulsively 
grasping his loaded rifle, '^ I don't know you — 
you are not aware " 

'* Again my friend Marston is perfectly right, 
Mac," interrupted Ardan, ** and I honor him 



IVAR TO THE KNIFE. 327 

for his noble devotion to his calumniated friend. 
But the ball is not yet cast that Captain I\Ic- 
Nicholl is to fire either at IMarston or Barbican. 
Mac, I have a little proposition to make, that 
will put all notions of fighting out of your 
head." 

'' Let us hear it," said the Captain, begin- 
ning to be rather ashamed of his violence and 
not knowing what else to say. 

'^ Excuse me, i\Iac," replied Ardan, ^^ I can't 
broach it until we are all in Barbican' s pres- 
ence." 

** Let us go after him then right away !" cried 
the Captain, drawing the charge of his rifle, 
and starting off at a rapid but irregular pace, 
closely followed by his companions. 

For a full half hour or more they had noth- 
ing whatever for their pains. IMarston began to 
mistrust the Captain, and eyed him every now 
and then with a very suspicious glance. He 
even set himself to thinkhig what course he 
should follow if they came suddenly on poor 
Barbican' s body weltering in his gore, his skull 
smashed with the Captain's bullet. Ardan too 
seemed to be troubled with the same idea, for 
he also began to survey the Captain with a de- 
cidedly uneasy glance. 



328 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

All at once, Marston, who had the best eyes 
of the party, suddenly stopped, and pointing to 
the left, exclaimed : 

'^It is he ! Look T' 

Peering through an opening in the foliage, 
they could see the motionless body of a man 
reclining at the silver gray foot of a beautiful ca- 
talpa tree at least two feet in diameter and twenty 
or thirty paces off. They could not see his face, 
the hat being over the eyes, and the body be- 
ing half covered in the tall grass. Again Ardan 
shot an eagle glance into the eyes of McNicholl, 
but the Captain never winced a moment. Mars- 
ton sprang forward, exclaiming : 

'' Barbican ! Barbican !" 

No reply. The three men, very much puz- 
zled, advanced towards the prostrate form, but 
they suddenly stopped short, uttering exclama- 
tions of surprise at what they saw. 

Barbican, stretched at his ease on the grass, 
his back resting against the tree, his rifle, un- 
cocked, lying in the grass two or three paces 
distant, was drawing geometrical figures and 
calculating algebraic equations in his diary ! 

Before any one could say a word, he sud- 
denly closed his book, jumped up, waved his 
hand over his head and cried out : 



IVAR TO THE KNIFE, 329 

" Hurrah ! Hurrah ! Eureka ! I have got 
it !^* 

''What?" cried Marston, who was the nearest. 
''What have you got?" 

" My plan !" 

" What plan ?" asked Ardan, taking him by 
the hand. 

" My plan to counteract the projectile's con- 
cussion at the start !" 

" No !" cried Ardan with a glance at the 
Captain. " You don't say so ?" 

" Yes, I do ! It's all right ! Water will do 

the business ! Hello, Marston, you here ! 

You too, Ardan ! — " 

"My own four bones," interrupted Ardan, 
" and permit me to have the honor of intro- 
ducing at the same time my good friend Cap- 
tain McNicholL" 

" McNichoU !" cried Barbican, making for 
his rifle. " Excuse me. Captain — I had forgot- 
ten — but I am ready — " 

Marston had already secured the rifle, and 
Ardan now cut in before the enemies would 
have time to exchange words. 

"By Jove," he exclaimed; "how lucky it 
is for Marston and myself that you two fellows 
did not meet sooner. We should have a greater 



330 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

Stock of dead bodies on hand than we would like 
to carry. Heaven, whose favorites we must be, has 
spared us the very disagreeable task of bothering 
ourselves to know what to do with them. But 
now all danger is over, for you two must likewise 
have been Heaven's favorites. When one terrible 
duellist forgets his hatred so much that he risks 
his life for the sake of an algebraic equation, 
and when the other renounces every chance of 
killing his enemy for the sake of delivering a 
little bird from the claws of a spider, the thirst 
of vengeance that influences their hearts cannot 
be called exceedingly insatiable ! I'll tell you 
all about it, Barbican." 

Having sketched rapidly, and with a good 
deal of humorous exaggeration Marston's and 
his own adventures from the moment he had 
been so unceremoniously aroused from his slum- 
bers to the present instant, he added a few 
words in a voice full of feeling : 

^' And now I'll just ask yourselves, if two 
such good natured, tender hearted, whole souled 
fellows as you, have been intended by Heaven to 
blow each others' skulls to pieces with rifle balls ?" 

The two rivals were gradually discovering that 
there was something so comical and at the 
same time so unexpected and strange in their 



PFAK TO THE KNIFE, 331 

respective positions, that they felt the anger 
rapidly oozing away at their finger ends, and 
they hardly knew what decision to come to. 
Ardan, conscious of his advantage, pressed it home. 

'' My dear friends,'* he continued, his lips 
wreathed in his sweetest smile, '* my dear and 
respected friends, nothing more has ever existed 
between you than a little misunderstanding. Now, 
as you don't know what such a thing as bodily 
fear is, to show that all ill feeling between you 
is at an end forever, I want you to accept the 
proposal I am going to make.'* 

'^ Speak," said the Captain, *^ let us hear 
it first." 

*' My friend Barbican," said Ardan, *^ you 
believe your projectile will go straight to the 
Moon ?" 

'' Certainly, I do." 

** My friend Mac, you believe it will fall 
back to the earth ?" 

'' Not a doubt of it." 

"Very good," continued Ardan. "Now I 
don't pretend to be able to make you agree. So 
I simply say : Come both of you along with 
me, and then you will find out who is right !" 

"What's that?" cried Marston, not believing 
his ears. 



332 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

The proposal was hardly announced when the 
rivals found themselves looking at each other 
very keenly. Neither spoke. Barbican was wait- 
ing to hear McNicholl. The Captain wanted 
to know what the President had to say. 

*^ Well, dear boys/' resumed the Frenchman, 

in a tone that would coax a bird off a tree, 

^* as there is no longer any danger from the 

concussion *' 

*' Accepted !'' ) 

_ , , .,, > cried the rivals with one voice, 

'' Accepted V ) ' 

*' Hurrah ! Bravo ! Three cheers !" cried 
Ardan, shaking the opponents warmly by the 
hands, while he executed a series of entrechats 
and other fancy steps in a style that would have 
made a Black Crook dancer's fortune. 

'* And now, my dear boys," he added when 
he had come to himself, ^' let me remind you 
of a very important fact. I am as hungry as 
an ostrich ! I have had no breakfast to-day 
and took no dinner yesterday. I don't think 
you have been a bit more fortunate. I have 
therefore the honor to invite you to join me, 
and, to celebrate this happy occasion, we must 
get the very best that the Tampa market affords. 
Hang the expense !" 

Marston did not utter a word all the way 



IVAJ^ TO THE KNIFE. 333 

back to town. He was the whole time engaged 
in solving a very difficult problem : What had 
he gained by the morning's labors ? Does it 
make much difference, whether your friend is 
killed in a duel or blown to pieces from a 
projectile ? 



CHAPTER XXII. 



POPULARITY IN AMERICA. 



The friends had not finished their dejeuner a la 
fourchette before all America was ringing with 
the details of the duel and its singular termina- 
tion. The distinguished part played in the 
drama by the gallant Frenchman, the unexpec- 
ted proposition with which he had put an end 
to the difficulty, its simultaneous acceptance by 
the two rivals, the contemplated conquest of the 
Lunar Continent by the allied forces of France 
and America — everything, in short, conspired to 
raise Ardan's already great popularity to the 
highest possible pitch. 

Most people in Europe know how madly the 
Americans run after every *^ distinguished for- 
eigner,'^ as soon as he lands on their shores. It 
makes no difference from what country he comes, 
why he comes, what claim he has on America, 
or if he has any claim at all ! Dickens, Kos- 
suth, the Prince of Wales, the Grand Duke, 
etc., etc., had assuredly done very little to ex- 
cite the crazy enthusiasm of the United States, 
(334) 



POPULARITY IN AMERICA, 335 

yet they were honored with receptions worthy 
of the greatest benefactors of the earth, almost 
of a divine visitant from heaven. Do you hap- 
pen, my excellent European reader, for any 
reason whatsoever, at the present moment to be as 
the saying is, '^ in every body's mouth ?" Then 
go to America at once ; nothing more is neces- 
sary to insure you a brilliant reception. Will 
your popularity last ? Ah ! mon ami, that's 
another pair of sleeves, as we say in France. 
The fiercest flame is not always the longest or 
the steadiest, and the Great Republic has not yet 
freed herself from all the little infirmities inci- 
dent to our common human nature. 

For the time being, certainly Ardan's popu- 
larity was absolutely unbounded. Deputations 
from all parts of the country never gave him a 
moment's repose. He could not avoid receiv- 
ing them. How can you refuse seeing a man who 
has come a thousand miles to shake your hand ? 
Worse than that. In America you insult a man 
if you refuse a drink at his invitation. Ardan 
would not insult anybody, and consequently 
every resource of his fertile imagination was 
taxed to the utmost strain in trying to recon- 
cile two ideas diametrically opposite : to avoid 
giving ofience, and at the same time never get 



336 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

tight. How he always struck the golden mean 
so successfully, how in the hardest bouts his head 
always kept '' level/' and his tongue still con- 
tinued to flow on with the light airy graceful 
humor that made him such a charming com- 
panion, is a problem beyond my powers of solu- 
tion. Most assuredly his task was not any easy 
one, for the Americans, though they are never 
drunk; can put away a good deal of liquor. 

Of course, every now and then, Ardan would ex- 
perience some of the inconveniences to which even 
greatness is liable. For instance, he was pounced 
on four or five times every twenty-four hours by 
the agent of a Boston company called the As- 
trocheutic, or star-diffusing society, who offered 
him a thousand dollars for every lecture he would 
deliver in each of the great chief cities of the 
Union. To get rid of such a leech required 
the display of patience, perseverance and force 
of character of a very high order, but every new 
visit left Ardan considerably weaker than before. 
He was hesitating what to do, when relief came 
from an unexpected quarter. The agent of a 
rival company of New York, the Utile- cum- Dulci 
Society^ offered the distinguished Frenchman six 
thousand dollars a week for five weeks with all 
expenses paid, for a short lecture every day in 



POPULARITY IN AMERICA, 337 

whatever part of the country the association 
might think proper to send him to. This was 
enough for Ardan. He instantly accepted the 
offers of both, throwing on the agents the task 
of settling their conflicting claims to mutual sat- 
isfaction. This of course they could never do ; 
and the result was the famous law suit between 
the two great societies, which, though the best 
lawyers of the land were engaged on each side, 
is still dragging its slow length along in the 
Supreme Court of the United States. 

Another thorn in his side for a while was the 
famous P. T. Barnum. This distinguished gen- 
tleman waited on him in person and offered him 
a million of dollars for the privilege of exhibit- 
ing him for a month, at fifty cents a head, with 
the Woolly Horse, the Feejee Mermaid, the 
Giant Quakeress, the Talking Fish, the Living 
Ichthyosaurus, the Sea Serpent, and the other 
wonders of his Great Moral Show. The Prince 
of Humbugs was withal so genial, so plausible, 
so insinuating that Ardan, finding it impossible 
to get angry with him, promised to accede to 
his demands on the return of the party from the 
Moon, if he, Barnum, would only join them in 
the trip. But the genial showman, knowing what 
a serious loss even his temporary absence would 



338 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

prove to the progress of the great Temperance 
movement in the United States, hastily declined 
the offer with many thanks, and started that 
very night for New York. 

Need I say that ^^ interviewing reporters " 
waited on the daring Frenchman by the thou- 
sand ? or that they were dismissed as wise as 
they came ? or that this prevented their letters 
from being quite as long and just as veracious 
as usual ? " 

I must hurry through a few more instances, in- 
troduced simply to give my French readers an 
idea of their countryman's extraordinary popu- 
larity in the Great Republic. 

For three Sundays in succession, the sensation 
preachers of the fashionable churches of New 
York took his name for their text, and, if they 
did not handle their subject with much piety, 
they at least displayed extraordinary ingenuity 
and learning in giving it a meaning of deeper 
significance than his parents had ever thought of 
at his baptism. Some quoted Nineveh inscrip- 
tions to prove it to be Aryan ; some by means 
of cuneiform characters showed beyond, all doubt 
that it was Semitic ; certain passages in Zoroaster 
convinced some that it was Zend ; Grimm's 
Rule left no doubt on the minds of others that 



POPULARITY IN AMERICA. 339 

It was High German ; whilst others, Max Miiller 
in the right hand and the Bible in the left, 
demonstrated by the strictest adherence to the 
laws of language that it was veritable Celtic. 
These edifying sermons, so refreshing in their 
light, culture and sweetness, were all published 
in Monday's Herald, and had, it is needless to 
say, an enormous sale. 

Then his portraits — how could I describe the 
endless trouble to which he was subject in pre- 
venting deadly conflicts between the rival pho- 
tographers ? Could I even enumerate the 
styles in which he was taken ? Or the sizes, 
from that of life down to the little micro- 
scopic charms to hang on a watch chain ? or 
the position, head, bust, whole figure, vignette, 
full, profile, half, three-quarters ? Even photo- 
graphs of the back of his head found a ready 
sale. More than fifteen hundred thousand were 
sold, and in every album he shared the post 
of honor with General Washington. 

With all its drawbacks, Ardan hardly found 
his wonderful popularity displeasing. He even 
liked it, and readily yielded to its demands. Un- 
less when engaged writing replies to his thou- 
sand and one correspondents, he was always to 
be found in some public place — the ''Plaza,*' 



340 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

for instance, a beautiful open square in Tampa, 
not yet quite finished, but already a pleasant 
place with flower plats, fountains, statues, and 
shady walks under old trees of the original for- 
est. Here he could be found every evening, or 
else on the deep verandah of his hotel, surrounded 
by an eager crowd of admirers. His style of 
dress became the rage — the ^* Ardan '' is still a 
favorite name with paper collar manufacturers — his 
jokes, especially those he never made, were ex- 
tremely quoted — his ^^ little stories '* filled several 
volumes which formed almost the sole reading 
of the railroad travellers— and the great " story 
newspapers *' sent him blank checks in return 
for any article bearing his name on any subject 
at all. An unfortunate bookseller, nearly ruined 
by publishing the Rig Veda, of which he had 
sold exactly eleven copies, expressed his perfect 
willingness to publish all the other Vedas, if 
Ardan would only write a general preface to 
the work. That would be enough, as he ex- 
pressed it, ** to send them all off like hot 
cakes. ' ' 

Need I say that he was even more popular 
with the fairer portion of humanity than with 
his own sex ? No good-looking tenor ever 
emptied into the stove the hundredth part of the 



POPULARITY IN AMERICA. 341 

billets doux he found every morning lying on his 
breakfast table. If he would only rnarry and set- 
tle, what splendid opportunities he might have 
by just saying the word ! The rich old maids 
were continually writing to him for his autograph, 
but the buxom widows would not be put off with 
anything short of a regular letter. He was so 
beset with offers of matrimony that at first he 
thought of trying the '* Moon-dodge/* so suc- 
cessfully employed against Barnum, but he soon 
found it would not work. The old philosopher 
who, when writing about woman, defines her as 
quiddain ti77iidum et se retrahens, ** a timid and 
shrinking creature,*' assuredly knew more about 
his books than his subject. When a woman once 
makes up her m.ind, she is the bravest of the 
brave. In support of this remark we need only 
state that whereas in the whole United States, 
after Barbican, McNicholl and one more, not a 
single man or boy could be induced to go to 
the Moon on any consideration, letters appeared 
in the papers every day from women expressing 
themselves perfectly willing to start on a trip to 
the Moon, and even to Neptune if any body 
would take them. But it is needless to say that 
neither Ardan, Barbican nor McNicholl, all un- 
mitigated old bachelors of the worst kind, ^^ dyed 



342 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

in the wool/' was the man to entertain any such 
foolish idea for a single instant. 

The first favorable opportunity Ardan had of 
tearing himself away for awhile from his courtier 
throng in Tampa, he thought the least he could 
do was to pay a visit of respect to the Colum- 
biad. The odd moments that he could devote 
to the company of Barbican and his other 
friends, he generally employed in talking Ballis- 
tics with the Club men, whom he often called, 
half joke whole earnest, amiable murderers and 
scientific life-shorteners. His remarks when visit- 
ing the Columbiad for the first time, were some- 
what of the same nature. Having descended to 
the bottom of the gigantic engine that was so 
soon to launch them towards the Starry Queen, 
he professed his profound admiration for the ex- 
cellence of the magnificent piece of work, and 
then went on moralizing. 

** Now here is a cannon that I like, that I can 
recommend, that can do no harm to anybody, 
which is more than I ever said before, or ever ex- 
pected to say, for a cannon in all my life. The 
cannon a civilizer ! Heartless, heathenish idea ! 
I differ from my friend Barbican in ioto — though 
I believe that at heart he agrees with me. I 
never could bear the sight of your monstrous 



POPULARITY IN AMERICA. 343 

engines for burning, crushing, killing, mangling 
wretched human beings by the score ! I hated 
the men that served them, and even the horses 
that dragged them !'* 

Whilst they were all down there by themselves, 
sheltered for a moment from the importunities of 
the public, Marston took advantage of the occasion 
to broach a project that he had been entertaining 
for some time, namely to join the !Moon party 
— ^' it would be so handy," as he said, ^^ to have 
a fourth man for a little game of euchre. '* The 
poor fellow's real reason was, of course, his de- 
spair at the idea of being separated from his 
friend Barbican, whom he almost worshipped. 
The President of the Gun Club knew this very 
well, but he was compelled to refuse positively 
on the ground of the absolute inability of the 
projectile to carry any more passengers. j\Iars- 
ton, deeply distressed, turned to Ardan for inter- 
cession, but the Frenchman shook his head. 

'^ Look here, old fellow," he said quietly, 
'' you must not take offence at my words, you 
know j but really and truly you are not the 
style of man that I should like to take with me 
to the Moon. You are incomplete, you know." 

" Incomplete !" cried Marston. ** What do 
you mean ?" 



344 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

*' I mean you are an incomplete, mutilated, 
garbled, truncated man ! Look at your artifi- 
cial arms ! Imagine our embarrassment on meet- 
ing the Selenites. How could we explain away 
your mutilation ? What an exalted idea they 
should conceive of us Terrestrians when we told 
them that we spend a great part of our time 
fighting each other, breaking each other's limbs, 
slaughtering each other, and that the most civi- 
lized nations train their best men to be noth- 
ing better than accomplished murderers — and all 
this on a globe that could easily sustain a hun- 
dred billions of inhabitants, and where there is 
not at present the eightieth part of that num- 
ber ! No, no, my dear boy, the very sight of 
you would get us kicked out of Luna's domin- 
ions in double quick time !'' 

Marston, having no reply ready for language 
of this kind, was forced to keep silence ; as the 
days passed on, he became more and more melan- 
choly, falling into a kind of stupor from 
which even the great preparations made on all 
sides could hardly arouse him. 

A preparatory experiment, made on October 
1 8th, gave the best results and excited the 
most promising hopes. Barbican, desirous to. 
ascertain the effect of the concussion occurring 



POPULARITY IN AMERICA, 345 

at the instant of a projectile's departure, had a 
32 inch mortar brought from Pensacola. It was 
placed on the shore so that the shell might de- 
scend on the water, and thereby the violence 
of its fall be diminished — the question being, 
not to test the effect of the concussion at the end 
of the course, but at the beginning. 

Accordingly a hollow shell was most carefully 
prepared. Its interior walls were lined with a 
soft thick padding, firmly kept in its place by 
a net work formed of the finest steel springs. 
It was, in fact, a regular bird's nest, artistically 
made and most comfortably w^added. 

Into this harmless bombshell, which could be 
firmly closed by means of a screw fastened lid, 
they introduced first a large cat, then a very 
pretty squirrel belonging to Marston, who had 
made it quite a pet. The object of introducing 
the second animal was to ascertain how a living 
thing so slightly affected with vertigo as a 
squirrel, could endure the experimental trip. 

The mortar was loaded with a charge of 
powder, the shell put in its place, and the 
piece fired off. The projectile shot up rapidly, 
describing its majestic parabola, reached a height 
of about a thousand feet, and then fell with a 
graceful curve into the midst of the waves. 



346 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

Without a moment's delay, a boat started for 
the spot ; skilful divers plunging into the water 
and fastening cords to the ears of the shell, it 
was soon hauled aboard. Five minutes had not 
elapsed from the moment at which the animals 
had been fastened up, to that when the lid of 
their prison was unscrewed. 

Ardan, Barbican, Marston, and McNicholl 
were all in the boat, and you can easily com- 
prehend with what interest they watched the 
experiment. Scarcely was the lid opened, when 
out jumped the cat, a little scared and towzled, 
but as lively as ever, and evidently not a par- 
ticle the worse for her aerial flight. 

But no squirrel made his appearance. They 
waited for him. They looked for him. They 
shook the shell, and turned it upside down. 
No ' squirrel. There was no mincing the matter. 
The cat had eaten up her fellow traveller. 

It is surprising how deeply this incident 
affected Marston. Not so much on account of 
the loss of his squirrel — though the lively little 
animal had been a great favorite — as from a 
superstitious idea to which his brooding and un- 
happy mind now easily became a prey. The 
little experiment was clearly the type of the 
great one, and foreshadowed its fate. The 




THE CAT TAKEN OCT OF THE SHELL 



POPULARITY IN AMERICA. 347 

cat, of course, was Ardan, who would return 
safe and sound. But Marston could not shake 
off the notion that the squirrel's doom was 
ominous of his friend Barbican* s destruction. 
That the squirrel, indeed, might prefigure Mc- 
Nicholl was barely possible ; yet this was the 
only straw to which the drowning man now 
clung for consolation. 

The experiment having put an end to all 
doubt, hesitation and fear, and as Barbican' s 
plans were certain to render the projectile more 
perfect and to reduce to little or nothing the 
terrible effects of the concussion, little more 
now remained to be done than to make immedi- 
ate preparations for starting. We shall close 
this chapter with one more instance of Ardan' s 
decided popularity in America. 

A morning or two after the experiment, Bar- 
bican met Ardan, and, remarking that his friend's 
countenance always radiant was now resplendent, 
asked the reason. 

*' I heard from Ulysse to-day," was the re- 
ply, delivered in a tone that betrayed consider- 
able self satisfaction. 

^^ From whom?" asked Barbican, slightly in- 
terested. 

'' Ulysse." 



348 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

'MVho IS Ulysse?" 

^^ Ma fot, Ulysse — my friend — the President 
of the United States !" 

^^ Oh ! General Grant ! Well, what did he 
write about ?'* 

^^ He writes to inform me that the House 
and the Senate, assembled in an extra session 
called for the purpose, have unanimously de- 
cided to confer on me, as once before on 
my illustrious countryman, Lafayette, the right 
to call myself a citizen of the great United 
States of America. And I tell you I am proud 
of the honor T' 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

AN IMPROVEMENT ON PULLMAN. 

The Columbiad once finished, examined, criti- 
cised and talked about, the public interest natur- 
ally passed on to the projectile — the new palace 
car for what Ardan had called the great Air Line 
Railroad. 

Nobody forgot that the Frenchman in his dis- 
patch had demanded an important modification 
of the shape adopted by the Committee at its 
first session. On that occasion Barbican had 
not troubled himself about any particular form 
of the bullet, for the atmosphere once passed, 
the projectile was thenceforth to wing its way 
through the regions of eternal void. The Com- 
mittee had therefore adopted the spherical shape, 
principally on account of its simplicity, as spin- 
ning on its axis would do it no harm as it went 
along. But the matter evidently became quite 
serious, the moment the projectile was trans- 
formed into a vehicle. Ardan had no desire 
to travel, like a squirrel, head over heels ; he 
wanted to perform his journey like a man, head 

(349) 



350 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLU3, 

always above, feet always below, and his general 
position much more comfortable than in the car 
of a balloon, where, though moving far less 
rapidly, you are subject to a constant succession 
of somersets anything but dignified. 

A new draft had accordingly been sent to Me- 
neely & Co., Albany, with directions to have it 
attended to with all possible speed. The pro- 
jectile, thus finally modified, was cast on Novem- 
ber 2d ; a few days afterwards, taken charge of 
by Adams Express Company, it was moving south- 
wardly on its way to Florida. 

Its progress was rather slow. In every city 
and even village through which it passed, it was 
stopped VI et armis long enough for all the in- 
habitants to see it. In some places they even 
celebrated its arrival as a holiday, appointed 
an orator to address it with an eloquent speech, 
and escorted it with a guard of honor as far as 
the next large town. 

Towards the middle of the month, it arrived 
safe and sound at Stony Hill, and you may be 
sure it was an object of profound interest to 
Ardan, Barbican and McNicholl, whose stout 
ship — or as Marston phrased it — ^^ whose adaman- 
tine ark it was to be, sailing over the ethereal 
billows of the astral deep !" 




THK ARUITAL OF THE PROJECTIJ.K AT STONY HILL. 



AN INPROVEMEXT ON PULLMAN, 351 

It must be acknowledged that it was a magnifi- 
cent piece of workmanship, displaying considera- 
ble metallurgic skill, and highly creditable every 
way to American industry. It was the first time 
that aluminium had ever been obtained in such 
an immense mass — which alone was something to 
be justly proud of. It glittered in the sun like 
a silver mountain. It reminded Ardan's excited 
imagination of one of those conical little turrets 
so often seen on the corners of the great fortified 
castles of the middle ages. To complete the 
picture^ it wanted only loop holes and a weather- 
cock, 

^'Yes/* he exclaimed with a laugh, ^^ there 
we shall be quite at our ease, like a feudal lord 
perfectly safe in his donjon-keep. With a little 
artillery we might bid defiance to a whole Selen- 
ite army, supposing they are foolish enough to 
have anything of the kind in the ^loon.'' 

''You like the projectile, then?" asked Bar- 
bican, with a gratified air. 

'' Very much indeed," w^as the reply — '' only 
that it does not completely satisfy my cesthetic 
craving. I should wish its hard lines to be a 
little more shapely, and its cone to be a little 
more graceful. And it might be surmounted 
with some pretty metal ornament — a dragon, for 



352 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

instance, or rather, a phoenix rising from the 
flames, wings outspread, beak open *' 

*' Cui bono? What's the good of all that?" 
interrupted the matter-of-fact Barbican. 

^* You ask ? I'm surprised at you ! Remem- 
ber that whatever you may be at, it is never the 
worse for a little touch of art. Did you ever 
hear of an Indian play called the Baby Coach ^" 

*' Never," answered Barbican, looking as 
slightly interested as politeness would allow, 

*' In that play," continued Ardan, *' a burglar 
is introduced, who is going to break into a house 
by boring through the door. Only he cannot 
make up his mind w^iat shape to give the hole, 
whether that of a lyre, or a flower, or a bird, 
or a water pitcher. While he is hesitating, the 
patrol comes along and takes him prisoner. 
Now, Barbican, if you were on that burglar's 
jury, would you have the heart to find him 
guilty?" 

'' Most undoubtedly," exclaimed Barbican, 
*' and if I only had the fellow in Delaware, I 
should award him an extra amount of lashes on 
the bare back !" 

'^ Ah ! Barbarian ! Savage ! Steel heart !" 
cried Ardan, horrified. ^^ I am ashamed of you. 
Scratch a Russian and you come on a Tartar. 



AN IMPROVEMENT ON FULLMAN. 353 

Scratch Barbican and you find nothing but cast 
iron !'* 

^^ They call me old Pig Iron/' said Barbican, 
with a grim smile. 

^' Talking art to you/' said Ardan, ^^ is like 
teaching music to a deaf mute, or explaining 
the spectroscope to a man blind from his birth. 
But I give you fair warning. You may keep 
the outside of the projectile as tasteless and 
ugly as you like ; I shall take my revenge by 
furnishing the inside as artistically and as lux- 
uriously as becomes the ambassadors of our 
most illustrious and majestic planet !" 

To this Barbican made no objection, more 
particularly as he had not an instant himself to 
spare for the agreeable, every moment being de- 
voted entirely to the useful. In other words, 
he had been trying to bring to perfection his 
arrangements for overconiiDg the tremendous 
effects of the first concussion. 

Here was the trouble. Supposing you are 

seated in a railroad car moving fifty miles an 

hour, what would happen if the train suddenly 

stopped ? You v/ould be shot with frightful 

rapidity against the front part of the car. Why ? 

Because, though the car was stopped, yoicr body 

was not stoppedy and it therefore continued its 
23 



354 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

motion until it encountered some obstacle strong 
enough to arrest it. A danger of this nature, 
though proceeding from a cause precisely the 
reverse, threatened our travellers in the interior 
of the projectile. Before their bodies could 
possibly have time to partake of the motion, 
they would be struck a tremendous blow by 
the floor rising up against them with the enor- 
mous velocity of 12,000 yards a second. The 
consequence, if not provided against, would be 
of course precisely as fatal as if their bodies 
had been hurled against the floor with a force 
capable of producing the same annihilating 
swiftness. It was while lost in the problem of 
how to counteract the effect of this terrible 
concussion, that Barbican had forgotten all about 
his duel in the St. Helena Woods. But he 
had contrived to solve the difficulty in a very 
ingenious manner. 

Careful experiments had convinced him that 
no combination of metallic springs would be 
strong enough to deaden the violence of such 
a shock ; at last it occurred to him that water 
could be employed for the purpose with per- 
fect success. This is the way in which he pro- 
posed to manage. The floor of the projectile was 
to be overflowed with a bed of water to the 



AN IMPROVEMENT ON PULLMAN, 355 

height of three feet. This bed was to support a 
circular disc, like the piston of a cylinder, water- 
tight, but moving readily up or down. On this 
false bottom the travellers would take their 
stand. The liquid mass below did not form 
one solid body ; it was separated by several 
horizontal partitions, to be broken in succession 
by the violence of the shock. Each sheet of 
water forced up through escapement pipes, by the 
sudden rising of the bottom, towards the upper 
portion of the projectile, would thus form a 
kind of spring equally advantageous to ceiling 
and floor; whilst the floor itself — which -stout 
pillars, provided with an extremely strong buff- 
ing apparatus, prevented from flying to the roof 
— could not strike the bottom until after the 
successive destruction of the difl'erent partitions. 
Undoubtedly the travellers would still experience 
a very violent concussion the moment the liquid 
mass would have escaped, still the first shock, 
the most to be dreaded, would be almost com- 
pletely deadened by this water spring, whose 
force was almost beyond calculation. 

Such a niass of water, three feet in depth and 
nine in diameter, would, it is true, increase the 
weight of the projectile by at least two thousand 
pounds, but the elastic force of the accumulated 



356 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

gases, Barbican was confident, would easily over- 
come the additional burden ; besides, as all 
this water would be driven out in less than a 
second through holes especially drilled for the 
purpose, the projectile would resume its normal 
weight almost instantaneously. 

This was Barbican' s plan for resolving what 
we call in France the coiitre coup, and for which 
I don't know any English term but concussion. 
It was an. exceedingly clever contrivance, and 
the idea was just as cleverly carried out, and 
even improved upon, by the intelligent machin- 
ists tiO whose care the whole operation had been 
entrusted by Meneely & Co. The shock once 
successfully resisted and the water driven out, 
the travellers could easily get rid of the broken 
partitions, of the pillars which had done their 
duty as buffers, and even of the disc itself, if 
they should find it in their way. 

The ceiling of the projectile chamber was 
lined with a thick leather padding hanging 
from spirals of the best steel, elastic as watch 
springs. The pipes for the escape of the water 
were so completely hidden by this thick leather 
padding that their existence could not even be 
suspected. 

(I must, however, acknowledge that in this 



AN IMPROVEMENT ON PULLMAN, 357 

contrivance one thing has always puzzled me. 
How was the water to be got rid of? At the 
bottom or by the sides ? Either supposition lies 
open to serious objections. How could the padding 
at the ceiling escape destruction from the dread- 
ful recoil ? When the famous Club conferred 
on me the unspeakable honor of entrusting me 
with their archives, in order that the admiring 
people of Europe might have a detailed account 
of their wonderful transactions, every operation 
described by Barbican was given in such clear 
and precise language that I understood it with- 
out difficulty, and wrote it out for my readers 
almost verbatim. But this contre-coup arrange- 
ment proves an exception to the general rule. 
At the first glance I thought I understood it 
completely. I now see I don't. Perhaps my 
readers have more perspicacity. I wrote to Bar- 
bican some time ago, stating my difficulties, but 
have received no reply. He is, I understand, 
at present deeply engaged in experiments with 
the spectroscope, and trying to establish a new 
idea regarding fluorescence. He has, in fact, 
given up Ballistics altogether, and I see by the 
papers that he gave a lecture some time ago 
before the Franklin Institute, in which he ad- 
vocated the startling notion that the Sun is 



358 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

nothing but a great electric battery, without 
either light or heat in itself, and that light 
and heat existed only where the currents came 
in contact with a planet or its atmosphere. If 
I ever hear from him again, I shall give my 
readers the benefit of the correspondence.) 

The projectile measured externally nine feet 
in width and fifteen in height. Not to exceed 
the assigned weight, the walls had been re- 
duced to about a foot in thickness, but the 
lower part, having to resist the first terrific 
shock of the gases developed by the gun cotton, 
had been considerably strengthened. 

This metallic tower was entered by a narrow 
opening in the upper part, somewhat like the 
man-hole of a steam boiler. It was closed her- 
metically by means of an aluminium door turn- 
ing on a hinge and fastened inside by a power- 
ful screw. Through this the travellers could 
leave their flying prison a.s soon as they would 
have reached the Lunar surface. 

Such a trip would evidently afford very little 
pleasure unless the travellers could look about 
them while on their way. The contrivance 
enabling them to do so was simple enough. 
Four holes, concealed by the leather padding, 
contained circular lights of plate glass of the best 



AN IMPROVEMENT ON PULLMAN. 359 

quality and of great thickness. Two of these 
holes had been drilled through the side walls, one 
through the bottom, and one through the coni- 
cal point. By means of these lights, the travel- 
lers could easily see not only what was going 
on around them, but also the earth that they 
were leaving and the Moon that they were ap- 
proaching. Of course these plates were solidly 
protected from the shock of the start by strong 
deadlights, fitted into their places with perfect 
joints, but easily opened outwards by means of 
screws worked from the inside. In this way, the 
air could not escape, and taking observations 
was an easy matter. 

It is almost needless to say that all these ap- 
pliances and contrivances, subjected to the most 
rigid tests and working with the greatest facility, 
were as creditable to the mechanics now at 
work on the projectile as its casting and finish- 
ing had been to the firm of ]Meneely & Co. 

Receptacles, solidly fastened down, contained 
water and provisions for the travellers, who 
were also furnished with light and heat by 
means of a supply of gas kept in a tank under 
the strong pressure of several atmospheres. All 
they need do was turn on the cock, and for 
six days they had gas enough to light and heat 



360 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

the whole cosy vehicle. Nothing, in fact, 
was wanting in the essential requisites of life 
and comfort. Even the agreeable united with 
the useful, thanks to Ardan's artistic eye, who 
would have turned the chamber into a veritable 
boudoir if there was only room enough. The 
travellers, however, were not so closely packed 
together as you might imagine. They had about 
fifty square feet to move about in, and as soon 
as they got rid of the water, their ceiling would 
be nine feet high. Ardan had by no means ex- 
aggerated when asserting that even the Pullman 
cars on the Pacific Railroad could not surpass 
the projectile vehicle in solid comfort. 

The questions regarding provisions and light 
being thus satisfactorily disposed of, the next 
to be considered was how to obtain a supply 
of air. As a healthy man consumes in an hour 
all the oxygen contained in 22 gallons of air, 
it is evident that the slight supply enclosed 
in the projectile would be soon exhausted. A 
simple calculation showed that Barbican, his 
two companions, and two dogs that they in- 
tended to take along with them, would con- 
sume in twenty four hours at least 540 gallons 
of oxygen, about seven pounds in weight. Evi- 
dently the air had to be renewed ; but how ? 



AN IMPROVEMENT ON PULLMAN. 361 

By a very simple phn, called Reiset and Reg- 
nault's Process, alluded to already, as the reader 
may remember, by Ardan, during the progress 
of his discussion with Captain IMcNicholl. 

Air, as is well known, consists principally of 
two gases, oxygen and nitrogen, in the propor- 
tion of about 20 of the former to 80 of the 
latter, or as one is to four. What takes place 
when we breathe ? A simple operation. We 
absorb much of the oxygen of the air, because 
it is absolutely necessary for our existence, 
whereas we exhale the nitrogen unchanged. The 
expired air, having lost nearly five per cent, of 
its oxygen, contains in place of it about the 
same volume of carbonic acid, produced by the 
union of the blood with the exhaled oxygen. It 
is therefore evident that in a closed apartment, 
after a certain time, the whole oxygen of the 
air is replaced by carbonic acid, a gas essentially 
injurious to human life. 

The nitrogen question presenting no difficulty, 
two things were clearly to be done : i, to renew 
the absorbed oxygen j 2, to destroy the exhaled 
carbonic acid. Both these objects could be 
readily attained by means of potassium chlorate 
and caustic potash. 

Potassium chlorate, the well known salt from 



362 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

which oxygen is most readily obtained for ex- 
perimental purposes, crystallizes in large six-sided 
plates, and, when heated to about 800° Fahren- 
heit, readily parts with its oxygen, chloride of 
potash being the residue. As eighteen pounds 
of this salt yield seven pounds of oxygen, two hun- 
dred pounds would evidently be more than even 
twice the quantity required before the travellers 
got to the Moon, 

Oxygen being thus supplied, carbonic acid could 
be readily destroyed by potassium hydrate, com- 
monly called caustic potash. This white crystal- 
line substance is well known for its powerful affinity 
for water and carbonic acid, both of which it im- 
mediately absorbs from the air, and, uniting readily 
with them, becomes a moist carbonate of potash. 

By combining these two operations, the dis- 
tinguished French chemists, Reiset and Reg- 
nault, had succeeded in purifying polluted air 
and restoring its life-sustaining properties. Their 
experiments, however, having been made only 
on animals, it was still questionable how this 
artificial air would affect human beings. Such a 
question evidently requiring an answer of the 
most satisfactory kind, Ardan professed his wil- 
lingness to try the effect on himself. But this 
Marston would not hear of. 



AN IMPROVEMENT ON PULLMAN. 363 

** Since I cannot have the pleasure of going 
with you, my friends," he said in a tone that 
brooked no contradiction, '^ you must not refuse 
me the gratification of making myself useful by 
keeping watch and ward in the projectile for a 
week at least." 

All objections being useless, particularly as 
somebody had to make the experiment, a suffi- 
cient quantity of potassium chlorate and caustic 
potash being given to him, together with provi- 
sions for eight days, he shook hands with all his 
friends on the morning of November the twelfth. 
Ordering them not to open his prison until the 
evening of that day week, he ascended the 
ladder with a bold heart, let himself into the 
trap door with some difficulty, pulled the cover 
after him, which was then hermetically sealed by 
a temporary arrangement especially contrived 
for the purpose. 

Night and day all that week, watchmen pa- 
trolled around the projectile, carefully listening 
and ready to sound an alarm at the least noise. 
But they heard absolutely nothing. The great 
projectile was as silent as the sarcophagus in the 
heart of an Egyptian pyramid. 

On the evening of November 19th, at four 
o'clock, in the presence of a prodigious multi- 



364 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

tude, the cover was lifted up. For a moment 
or two nobody appeared, and the silence of death 
pervaded the vast assembly. For an instant 
the spectators felt a cold pang seize their hearts. 
But they were soon reassured by hearing Mars- 
ton's well known basso profundo lustily trolling 
out Yankee Doodle ^ and a tremendous yell rent 
the air at the sight of Marston's well known 
bust projecting from the trap door, his face 
smiling, his arms waving, and his eyes blinking 
from having been so long deprived of daylight, 
and probably also from his having been sud- 
denly awakened from a profound slumber. 

Far from being injured by the artificial air, 
he had even grown fat under the treatment ! 




J- T. MABSTON HAJ> ghown 



FAT. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

THE TELESCOPE ON THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 

About a year before this time, just after the 
close of the great subscription, Barbican, as the 
gentle reader no doubt remembers, had placed 
in the hands of Professor Belfast, the Director 
of Cambridge Observatory, a fund sufficiently 
great to pay for the construction of a vast opti- 
cal instrument. This was to be a telescope of 
power strong enough to render visible any object 
on the Moon's surface that reached nine feet 
in diameter. 

Telescopes are divided into two classes, the 
refractors and the reflectors ; and it is as well to 
know the difference between them. A refract- 
ing telescope has at its upper and larger end a 
convex lens called the object glass, and at its 
lower and smaller end another convex lens called 
the eye glass or the eye piece, because it is 
through it that the observer first looks. The 
rays emanating from a luminous body, con- 
verged into a focus by the object glass, there 
form an image which is magnified by the eye 

(365) 



36S THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

glass. A refracting telescope therefore is closed 
at each end by the lenses. 

The reflecting telescope, on the contrary — in- 
vented by Father Zucchi, a Jesuit, in 1652 — is 
open above so as to admit freely the rays pro- 
ceeding from the object under observation. 
These rays are reflected by a concave mirror 
situated at the lower end, towards a looking- 
glass placed on one side, whence they are again 
reflected to the eye-piece, which is so disposed 
as to receive and magnify the image. But 
whether a refractor or a reflector, the value 
of the telescope evidently depends altogether 
on the perfection attained by the objective^ 
whether this be a lens or a concave mirror. 

Within the last quarter century, these instru- 
ments have reached such a high degree of power 
as to give very astonishing results. We are 
far removed now from the era, when the 
^^ Starry '^ Galileo watched the heavenly bodies 
with his poor little telescope, magnifying only 
seven times. For the last three hundred years, 
optical instruments have been steadily under- 
going considerable enlargement, so that we are 
now able to sound the heavens to depths for- 
merly never dreamt of. 

At the period of the Gun Club's operations, 



THE GREAT TELESCOPE, 367 

the most remarkable of the world-famous re- 
fractors were : i, one belonging to the Pulkova 
Observatory, a little south of St. Petersburg, the 
object-glass of which was 15 inches in diame- 
ter ; 2, one belonging to M. Lerebours, the fa- 
mous optician of the Paris Observatory, with 
an object-glass of the same size ; and 3, the 
telescope belonging to Cambridge Observatory, 
Boston, U. S., with a magnificent objective 
reaching a diameter of 19 inches ! 

Among the reflectors, two in particular, were 
famous for remarkable power and gigantic size. 
The first, constructed by the elder Herschel, at 
Slough near Windsor, in 1789, was forty feet 
long with a speculum of highly polished metal, 
four feet in diameter. It had a magnifying 
power of six thousand, but, unfortunately being 
exposed a little too much to the weather, one 
night of damp atmosphere dimmed its speculum 
so much as to destroy its usefulness forever. The 
second, certainly the finest reflecting telescope in 
the world, was to be found in Ireland, in the 
County of Tipperary, not far from Birr, and be- 
longed to Lord Rosse. It is over fifty-six feet 
long, and has a speculum six feet in diameter 
and weighing at least three tons. Its reflecting 
surface, more than twice as great as Herschel' s. 



S68 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

and always attended to with the utmost care, 
exhibits objects with remarkable clearness and 
brilliancy. Strong chains, flying puUies, heavy 
counterpoises attached to walls of solid masonry, 
are required to move the enormous mass ; the 
expense of its construction could not have fallen 
short of 150,000 dollars, yet its magnifying power, 
under the most favorable circumstances, never 
exceeded 6,400. 

Such an • enlargement, no doubt very great, by 
bringing the Moon within forty miles distance 
from the naked eye, enables us to see any object 
on her surface that reaches sixty feet in extent. 
But our projectile being only nine feet in diame- 
ter, in order to be rendered visible, evidently re- 
quired a telescope possessing seven times the 
power of Lord Rosse's instrument, that is, one 
which would magnify at least 48 thousand times. 

This hasty resume gives the substance of the 
problem to be solved by the Cambridge Obser- 
vatory. There was no trouble in the financial 
aspect of the question. The difficulties were 
altogether material and practical. 

The first thing to be done was evidently to 
decide between refractors and reflectors. In one 
sense, the former presented decided advantages. 
With objectives of an equal size, they furnish 



THE GREAT TELESCOPE, 369 

clearer and brighter images, as rays refracted 
through a lens suffer less absorption than when 
reflected from a speculum. On the other hand, 
lenses are limited to a certain thickness ; if this 
be exceeded, the luminous rays are so much ob- 
structed that precision and definiteness immedi- 
ately disappear. Besides, when made on a large 
scale, their construction is extremely difficult, 
and requires several years of the most patient 
labor. A reflector was therefore preferred, 
both as affording greater amplification, and re- 
quiring less time for construction. 

Only, as luminous rays — especially when re- 
flected, like those coming from the Moon — lose 
much of their intensity while traversing our at- 
mosphere, the Gun Club had decided on erect- 
ing their instrument on one of the highest sum- 
mits of the Rocky Mountains. There the great 
relative clearness of the atmosphere should of 
course allow a superior brightness of the image. 

Still, in order to magnify this image 48 thou- 
sand times, Lord Rosse's speculum should evidently 
be considerably surpassed in size, and this was a 
matter of exceedingly great difficulty. To give 
the reader an idea of the extraordinary delicacy 
of touch required to produce the true parabolic 

curve — without which it is impossible to obtain 
24 



370 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

a correct image — it will be enough to state that, 
towards the edge of the speculum, a film of 
metal must be removed about loo times thinner 
than the paper on which this page is printed ! , 
Fortunately, a few years before this, Foucault, 
the famous savant of the Paris Observatory 
whose pendulum experiment gave a physical de- 
monstration of the earth's rotary motion, had 
discovered a simple and expeditious process 
for polishing specula, by substituting silvered 
glass for the ordinary metal. Nothing more 
was required than to cast a mass of molten 
glass of the required size and shape — a task 
comparatively easy — and then to cover its sur- 
face with an exceedingly fine film of silver. 
By careful polishing, this could be rendered 
highly reflective, and — most important considera- 
tion in the present instance — when, from any 
cause, the silvered surface of the glass should 
lose its brightness, the speculum, instead of be- 
ing irretrievably ruined, could be readily covered 
with another coating and made as brilliant as 
ever. It was this suggestion of Foucault's that 
the Cambridge men had followed out in con- 
structing their speculum. They also adopted 
Herschel's idea in devising what he called his 
Front View Telescope. Instead of having the 



THE GREAT TELESCOPE 371 

plane of the speculum perpendicular to the 
axis of the tube, it was inclined a little, so 
that the image was formed just at the edge of 
the upper end, where it could be viewed 
directly by the observer by means of his eye- 
piece. Thus the small mirror being entirely 
dispensed with, not only more rays were al- 
lowed to enter the tube but also less were ab- 
sorbed, and consequently the image was much 
brighter and more distinct. 

With such ideas determined upon, the nec- 
essary work at once began. According to the 
Observatory calculations, the tube of the new 
reflector should be 280 feet long, and its specu- 
lum 16 feet in diameter ! Yet even this colossal 
instrument could hardly be compared in size 
with the two mile long telescope proposed by 
Hooke, a distinguished English astronomer, 
who shares with Huygens of Holland the honor 
of inventing the hair spring of watches, and 
with Cassini of Italy that of discovering the 
rotation of Jupiter upon his axis. Nevertheless, 
the construction of such a mammoth telescope 
evidently should be attended with extraordinary 
difficulties. 

The question as to its position was soon de- 
cided. It was to be located on the summit of 



S72 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

a very high mountain, and very high mountains 
are not readily found in the United States. 
Indeed the whole oreographic system of that 
great country is very simple, being mainly con- 
fined to two distinct ranges — one on the east, 
the other on the west. They include be- 
tween them the immense valley drained by the 
famous Mississippi, surnamed by the Ameri- 
cans the King of Rivers — the only kind of 
king these fierce republicans will allow among 
them. 

The eastern range, first called the Appala- 
chian by De Soto from the Indians that he 
found inhabiting its southern end, follows the 
general direction of the coast ; it is about 1300 
miles long, and its middle portion, in Maryland 
and Pennsylvania^ is about 100 miles wide. Its 
highest group is in North Carolina ; but even 
here the Black Hills, so named from the dark 
foliage of their pine clad sides, reach an average 
altitude of only 4500 feet, their highest summit, 
the Black Dome, being no more than 6,760 feet 
above the level of the sea. Still less elevated 
is the New Hampshire group, called the White 
Mountains, on account of their bare, precipitous, 
granite sides. Its highest peak, Mt. Washing- 
ton, is 500 feet lower than the Black Dome, 



THE GREAT TELESCOPE, 373 

though, as it rests on a lower platform, it 
looks far more towering by the contrast. 

The western range comprises the famous 
Rocky ]\Iountains, which, starting from the Isth- 
mus of Darien, follow the general direction of 
the coast for about 4,000 miles, and finally lose 
themselves in the ice-bound swamps bordering 
on the Arctic Ocean. Their height, however, 
is far from corresponding with their length, the 
general altitude in the United States being only 
about 5 thousand, while that of the Alps is 8 
and that of the Himalayas is about 15 thousand 
feet. Even the highest peaks of these great 
mountain systems preserve nearly the same rela- 
tive proportions, Long's Peak being about 14, 
Mt. Blanc about 16, and Alt. Everest about 29 
thousand feet above the level of the sea. 

Higher peaks indeed than Long's were to be 
found on the North American continent — Mt. 
Hooker and Mt. Brown exceeding it in British 
America, and Popocatapetl and Orizaba far sur- 
passing it in INIexico, but the Gun Club, for 
very wise and sufficient reasons, had determined 
to confine the operations both of the Columbiad 
and the telescope to the territory of the United 
States. Therefore, long before the period to 
which our history is now arrived, the young 



374 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

professors of Cambridge, to whom the erection 
of the great telescope was confided, had dis- 
patched all the necessary materials to the snowy 
summit of Long's Peak, in the far off Territory 
of Colorado. 

Their task was a modern labor of Hercules. 
To-day, thanks to the completion of the Pacific 
Railroad, a trip to Long's Peak is only a pleasant 
promenade. You leave New York on Monday and 
arrive in Chicago on Tuesday. Next day you 
cross the Missouri at Omaha, and on Thursday 
you enter Cheyenne, 6,000 feet above the level 
of the sea. Here you take the Denver branch, 
and on Friday afternoon you find yourself revel- 
ling in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. 
Denver, a thriving city of 10,000 souls, the 
capital of Colorado, receives you hospitably. 
Though only settled in '58, the year of the 
capture of Lucknow, she can already show you 
her hotels, her banks, her churches, her thea- 
tres, her school houses and her tasty residences. 
Around you can see her gold, silver, coal, 
and copper mines ; her plains often alive with 
antelopes, buffaloes, and prairie dogs ; her won- 
derful fossil forests ; her stony castellations ; her 
deep cut gorges, and her rugged, brawny, amber- 
colored scenery. Farther off, through the moun- 



THE GREAT TELESCOPE. Zlb 

tain atmosphere, rendered transparent by an alti- 
tude of nearly 6,000 feet above the level of 
the sea, you can easily follow the Rocky Moun- 
tain range for a distance of 200 miles. A deli- 
cate haze softens the rich purple and the dazzling 
whiteness of its outline. Its serrated edge, pierc- 
ing the cloudless azure with a thousand snowy pin- 
nacles, culminates to the north in Long's Peak, 
to the west in Gray's Peak, and to the south 
in Pike's Peak, all apparently only a few miles 
distant, yet each requiring a good day's journey 
to reach even their bases. 

But at the period of our history, the Cam- 
bridge men had no Pacific Railroad to help 
them beyond Julesburg. Cheyenne consisted of 
only one house, and Denver was nothing but 
a *^ Roaring Camp," inhabited by gamblers and 
miners armed to the teeth, Mexicans, Indians, half 
breeds, and desperadoes, generally of the worst 
kind. The Colorado gold fever was still pretty 
high. In fact, from the moment that the 
Cambridge party left the main stream of the 
Platte to follow the South Fork, they could 
hardly have made any headway at all but for 
the aid generously afforded them by the numer- 
ous emigrants struggling on towards Pike's Peak. 

It was, however, at Cache la poudre Creek, a 



376 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

stream washing the base of the mountains, that 
their real difficulties commenced, and these now 
became so great that our pen absolutely shrinks 
from the task of detailing them. To erect a 
telescope on the summit of Long^s Peak, was a 
feat of gigantic labor, requiring energy the most 
daring, skill the most practical, patience the 
most enduring, and pluck the most persever- 
ing. Yet it was not too much for these won- 
derful Americans. 

A railroad had to be built to the mountain 
top, over yawning ravines, through primeval 
forests, around dizzy precipices, across lake-like 
glaciers, and up grades so steep that the cars had 
to be pushed by a locomotive whose central cog- 
wheel played in the broad, heavy, notched 
centre rail. This was the first railroad of the 
kind ever constructed, but since that time the 
same daring American genius has made itself felt 
in Europe. The engineer who sent the famous 
railroad up the sides of the Rigi in Switzer- 
land, first learned to overcome nature by coping 
with the mountain difficulties of the United 
States. 

Up this railroad had to be carried enormous 
piles of stone, heavy masses of wrought iron, 
corner clamps of prodigious weight, detached 




THE TELESCOPE OF THE KOCKY 3IOUNTAIX3. 



THE GREAT TELESCOPE, Zll 

pieces of the immense cylinder, the speculum 
itself weighing 50 tons — up into regions of per- 
petual snow, seventy miles from Denver the 
nearest settlement, in the savagest of savage 
regions, where, on account of the rarity of the 
air, even the simple act of breathing is painful 
and difficult, and the strongest constitutions are 
soon prostrated by the terrible *' mountain 
fever.'' 

The energy of these indomitable Americans 
overcame everything. Towards the end of Sep- 
tember, less than a year after the beginning of 
the work, the gigantic reflector pointed towards 
the stars it monstrous tube 280 feet in length. 
The enormous cylinder was held in its place by 
immense chains and counterpoises of vast weight. 
Ingenious machinery kept it in such complete 
control, that in spite of its prodigious weight 
and colossal size, it could be directed at will 
to any portion of the sky, and being equatori- 
ally mounted, it could easily follow the track 
of any star in its endless march from horizon to 
horizon. It was a splendid triumph of science, 
enthusiasm, industry and even honest economy, 
for, notwithstanding all the time, labor, and 
genius lavished upon it, its total cost amounted 
to a little less than 400 thousand dollars in 



378 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

greenbacks. Lord Rosse's, though constructed 
under his own eye and within his own park 
and nearly six times smaller, had cost him more 
than the one-third of that sum in gold. 

The first time the observers directed this 
magnificent structure towards the Moon, they 
felt themselves moved by a feeling at once of 
curiosity and indefinable uneasiness. Like Her- 
schel with his four foot reflector just completed, 
or Columbus on the deck of the Santa Maria, 
they almost trembled at the vastness of the 
wonders to be revealed to them. Were they 
to discover lunar animals, cities, lakes, fields 
and oceans ? A few moments* observation, how- 
ever, told them that though the volcanic nature 
of every portion of the Moon's surface stood 
revealed before them with absolute precision, yet 
they saw positively nothing that science had 
not disclosed to them before. 

Still the great telescope of the Rocky Moun- 
tains, before serving the purposes of the Gun 
Club, rendered immense services to Astronomy. 
Thanks to its tremendous power of penetration, 
the depths of the heavens were sounded with a 
success never reached before, and results were 
obtained which the learned societies all over the 
world hailed with delight. Eta Argus, for in- 



THE GREAT TELESCOPE, 379 

Stance, was resolved into a triple star, and thus 
easily accounted for its puzzling variations in 
brightness. Alpha Cenfauri, 6i Cygnt, and Si- 
rius, instead of the luminous pin-points that they 
show to the ordinary observer, presented a slight 
angle, like little planets. In the matter of 
Nebulae, the great telescope • demolished Lord 
Rosse as effectually as Lord Rosse's discoveries 
had demolished Sir William Herschel and the 
Nebular Hypothesis. For instance, the Dumb 
Bell, shown by Lord Rosse to be no Dumb Bell 
at all, but two unconnected ' streaks of star clus- 
ters, was resolved by the new telescope into three 
separate stars only, forming an isosceles triangle. 
Mu UrscB Majo7is, appearing to Herschel like a 
circular cloud, and to Lord Rosse like a halo 
surrounding a death's head with two ghastly 
eyes, was now shown to consist of a number of 
little stars apparently revolving around a centre, 
like the diagram of a solar system in our school 
books. 

Nevertheless, in spite of its immense power, 
some of the Great Nebula remained apparently 
as irresolvable as ever. Like misty ghosts they 
still seemed to flutter on vaporous wings over 
the outer verge of creation, furnishing endless 
food for the weirdest fancy. Central nuclei 



380 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

could still be seen with arms radiating like a 
star fish, or like the fire sparks of a revolving 
pin wheel. The great Nebula of Orion still 
looked, according to the mood of the obsen-er, 
like • the head and jaws of some monstrous ani- 
mal, or like a human being with the lower limbs 
torn off and the breast mangled with gashes. 
Not far from the trapezium you could still dis- 
cover the scarred surface of a cloud continent, 
rent with -volcanoes, or the distorted face of 
some monstrous lion struggling in the last ago- 
nies of death. Some few, however, of the Great 
Nebula, under the vast illuminating and magni- 
fying power of the great instrument, changed 
their appearance so much that the Cambridge 
men, whom their magnificent achromatic had ren- 
dered as familiar with them as with the streets 
of Boston, often failed to recognize them at 
all, even after their well trained eyes had been 
gazing at them long and carefully. 

They could see no trace of the planets said 
to be revolving around Sirius, Arcturus, Alde- 
baran and other bright stars ; and it is need- 
less to say that they saw no sign whatever of the 
Great Central Sun, around whose mysterious focus 
our own Sun with his retinue of planets is rapidly 
travelling, but travelling in a circle so vast that 



THE GREAT TELESCOPE, 381 

the period of the duration of the whole human 
race will be hardly long enough to show even 
the curvature of its arc ! Nor did the star in 
Hercules, towards which our universe is moving, 
appear to be more clearly defined by the great 
telescope, than when it is viewed with a common 
opera glass. No wonder. Had our common 
ancestor, Adam, seen Lambda Herculis the first 
night he spent in paradise, it would not have ap- 
peared to him a particle less remote, than it will 
to the last of his descendants ! 



CHAPTER XXV. 



CLOSING DETAILS, 



Leaving the Rocky Mountains, we return to 
Stony Hill, the spot on which the eyes of the 
world were now fixed with interest the 
most intent. It was November 2 2d, and in 
nine days more the final denouement of the won- 
derful drama was to take place. One single 
operation yet remained to be performed, but 
that one was of a nature so extremely delicate 
and perilous as to demand infinite precautions 
in order to ensure success. The Columbiad was 
to be loaded, that is, charged with 400 thousand 
pounds of gun cotton. 

The reader probably remembers that it was 

against the success of this operation that Mc- 

NichoU had laid his third wager. The Captain 

had concluded naturally enough that such a 

formidable quantity of pyroxyline could hardly 

be even handled without entailing the most 

serious consequences, and that in any case, the 

very pressure of the projectile would be enough 

to explode a mass of material so exceedingly 
(382) 



CLOSING DETAILS, 383 

inflammatble. He also counted on the well 
known recklessness and imprudence of the Ameri- 
cans, who during the great Civil War, were 
often seen puffing away at their cigars whilst 
in the very act of loading mortars with the 
terrible 30 pounders. 

But Barbican, thus far perfectly successful, 
was determined not to be wrecked within sight of 
port. Picking out the very best men with his 
own hand, he made them work under his own 
eye ; he never left them for an instant as long 
as they were engaged in the dangerous task ; 
and by his combined prudence, precaution, and 
ability to command, he secured in his favor all 
the chances of success. 

First of all, he took^ very good care not to 
bring to Stony Hill the whole charge at once. 
The 400 thousand pounds of gun cotton, divided 
into portions of 500 pounds each, were care- 
fully wrapped up in cartridges, manufactured by 
the best hands in Fort Brooke. These were 
to be carefully put in powder wagons especially 
built for the purpose, and rendered almost air- 
tight. Each wagon was to contain only ten car- 
tridges ;, one by one they were to leave Tampa, 
and in this way there was never more than 5,000 
pounds of gun cotton at one time in the depot 



384 THE BALTIMORE CUN CLUB. 

at Stony Hill. As soon as the wagon arrived, 
it was carefully unloaded by workmen walking 
in slippers, and each cartridge was carried in a 
hand-barrow to the mouth of the Columbiad, 
There it was quietly let down by machinery 
worked altogether by human power. Every steam 
engine had been removed, and even every fire 
had been extinguished within a circle of two 
miles in diameter. 

It was, in fact, an exceedingly difficult matter 
to guard these masses of gun cotton against the 
heat of the sun, even in November. Accord- 
ingly, the men worked at night, which, however, 
an electric light, obtained by the Ruhmkorff ap- 
paratus, rendered as brilliant as day, down even 
to the very bottom of the Columbiad. There 
the cartridges were carefully deposited with per- 
fect regularity, their centres being connected by 
fine wires which were to send the electric spark 
simultaneously through the entire mass. 

All these wires, protected by an isolating ma- 
terial, were to meet together and form a single 
wire at the point where the projectile was to rest 
upon its bed of gun cotton. There they left the 
Columbiad through a hole drilled for the pur- 
pose, and ascended to the surface through one 
of these vents or chimneys left in the stone 



CLOSING DETAILS. 385 

facing for the escape of the gases at the casting. 
From the summit of Stony Hill, the wire was 
then carried on telegraph poles for a distance of 
two miles to a Bunsen battery, which, replacing 
platinum by carbon, obtained great power at 
slight expense. This battery was connected with 
the wire by means of a little apparatus resemb- 
ling Morse's '' Key '' for transmitting. By simply 
touching the button with your finger, the cur- 
rent was established, and fire instantaneously com- 
municated through every particle of the 400 
thousand pounds of gun cotton. It is hardly 
necessary to say that it was only at the last mo- 
ment that the battery was to be got ready. 

The last of the 800 cartridges was stowed 
away safely in the depths of the Columbiad on 
the evening of November 28th. The opera- 
tion had therefore completely succeeded ; but 
how ? Barbican himself would be puzzled to 
tell. Never before had he engaged in anything 
that was at the same time so difdcult, trouble- 
some and vexatious. It was in vain that he 
had announced by great posters that there was 
'* positively no admittance on any account '* 
within the board fence enclosing the summit. 
The curious crowds pushed in at the gates ; 

when the gates were closed they climbed over 
25 



386 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

the fence ; when the fence was made too high, 
they broke it down. That was not the worst. 
Many were found crazy enough to smoke cigars 
and throw burning matches about in the midst 
of bales of gun cotton, which, in case of an 
explosion, would have sent them sky high by 
thousands off the face of the earth ! Poor 
Barbican's state of mind I shall not attempt to 
describe. Marston was just as much to be pitied. 
His impetuous S3'mpathy, combined with his stout 
frame and short neck, brought on even an ugly 
attack or two, from which he was recovered only 
by timely and copious drenchings of cold water. 
The other Club men likewise aided their Presi- 
dent bravely, unflinchingly ; but what could 
forty or fifty do in a crowd consisting of 
several hundred thousand sharp, peering, prying 
inquisitive Yankees, who smoked as naturally as 
they drew breath, and many of whom had never 
been without a cigar in their mouths from the 
time their teeth were able to hold one ! Even 
Ardan, who had volunteered to '^ boss *' one of 
the squads that unloaded the wagons, was de- 
tected smoking a magnificent Imperador, presented 
to him the previous evening by a Cuban friend. 
As may be readily conjectured, his further '' boss- 
ing " was immediately dispensed with, and, as 



CLOSING DETAILS. 387 

he could not be kept out of the enclosure very 
well, Barbican had him put under the constant 
surveillance of a private watchman. 

However, through the special providence that 
watches over, not only little children, but also 
drunkards, artillerymen and other varieties of 
the insane, there was no explosion. The load- 
ing was a perfect success, and the Captain's third 
bet was lost. Nothing more was now to be done 
than to introduce the projectile, and allow it 
to rest on its soft, tender, downy, but decidedly 
dangerous couch. 

But before proceeding to this last operation, 
all the objects necessary for the trip were to 
be stored away carefully and systematically in 
the vehicle-projectile. These were pretty numer- 
ous, and if Ardan only had his way, there 
would have been no room left at all for the 
travellers. You can hardly imagine all the arti- 
cles that this gay and festive artistic French- 
man wanted to take along. A Steinway piano, 
masks and foils, a violincello, boxing gloves, 
portfolios of rare prints, birds in cages, a dozen 
or two pairs of boots, a set of Dumas' novels 
in 117 vols., a painter's portable easel complete, 
three cases of Chambertin, a few barrels of Florida 
oranges, six volumes of the Patent Office Re- 



388 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

ports, presented to him as a great compliment by 
an admiring Senator from Pennsylvania — these 
articles, taken at random from his list, may give 
you an idea of the nature of the inutilities with 
which he thought of encumbering the projectile. 
But Barbican returned him his list, with a line 
penciled at the foot, saying that nothing would 
be admitted except what was absolutely and indis- 
pensably necessary. 

Besides the usual supply of mathematical instru- 
ments, carefully packed away in a conveniently 
fitted chest, the travellers took some extra ba- 
rometers, thermometers and telescopes. One of 
the indispensables was Beer and Maedler^s Mappa 
SelenograpMca, the Map of the Moon to which 
some allusion has been made in an earlier chap- 
ter of our history. This famous chart, published 
in four separate sheets, possesses every claim to 
be considered a perfect masterpiece of patient 
and intelligent observation. It gives with scru- 
pulous accuracy, the smallest details of the 
Moon*s surface that is turned towards the earth. 
On it you can easily trace the mountains, val- 
leys, circular cavities, craters, peaks, grooves, 
etc., with their exact dimensions, correct bear- 
ings and latest nomenclature, from the Mare 
Australe, on the southwesternmost edge of the 



CLOSING DETAILS. 389 

disc, to the Mare Frigoris, that is so plainly 
seen extendmg itself over the circum-polar re- 
gions of the north. Ardan acknowledged that, 
under the circumstances, such a map was better 
than the best Steinway, or even his favorite in- 
strument the violincello. 

They also provided themselves with three 
Spencer rifles and three fowling pieces, with pow- 
der, shot and patent cartridges in great abund- 
ance. ^* Nobody knows what we may have to 
deal with," said Ardan. ^* Men or animals, 
they may not possiby relish our visit ; we must 
therefore prepare ourselves for the worst." 

Besides weapons of defence, they took also a 
good supply of picks, spades, handsaws and 
other necessary implements ; and, as a matter 
of course, plenty of clothing suitable for all 
temperatures, from the icy chill of the . polar re- 
gions to the burning heat of the Torrid Zone. 

Ardan, by no means discouraged at the ill 
success of his first list, proposed taking along a 
certain number of animals, useful ones of course, 
as he saw no great necessity for acclimatizing 
serpents, tigers, alligators or other noxious crea- 
tures in the Lunar regions. '^ A few beasts of 
burden, you know," he observed to Barbican, 
'* the horse for instance, and even cows and 



390 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

sheep would be found exceedingly useful.*' 
** Granted, my dear Ardan/' replied Barbican, 
*' but once more I must remind you that our 
projectile is not Noah's Ark. It has neither 
its capacity nor its design. Let us once in a 
while, by way of change, try to content our- 
selves within the limits of the possible/' But 
Ardan persisting, the Captain was appealed to, 
and the contest was finally ended by a com- 
promise allowing two beautiful dogs to ac- 
company the travellers. One was a favorite 
pointer of McNichoirs, that had helped him to 
kill many a fat partridge in Maryland. The other, 
a splendid Newfoundlander belonging to a Bos- 
ton gentleman, had already made himself famous 
by saving three lives on the melancholy occasion 
of the wreck of the St, Lawre^ice off Cape Sable. 
His master, though much attached to him, readily 
presented him to Ardan, for whom the animal 
had taken a sudden and strong liking. 

Several packages of the most useful seeds were 
added to the list of the needful articles. Ardan 
would have liked to accompany them with a few 
sackfuls of earth to sow them in, and he in- 
sisted on taking along a dozen or two of young 
saplings of different species, carefully wrapped 
up in straw. 



CLOSING DETAILS, 391 

The necessity for provisions sufncient to last for 
several months, was evident at the first glance, 
for, likely as not, the travellers might land in a 
region of the Moon as bare as the desert of 
Sahara. Barbican easily succeeded in laying 
in enough for a year, by reducing to a very small 
bulk by hydraulic pressure a variety of meats, 
fruits and vegetables. These had been prepared 
expressly for the journey, and presented gratui- 
tously by the American Dessiccaiing Co?npany 
of New York, and the Liehig Extract of Afeat 
Company of England. Gail Borden, of Texas, 
who had invented m.eat biscuits before Liebig, 
sent the travellers more of his famous condensed 
milk than ten times their number would require. 
They also supplied themselves with a small cask 
of the best Cognac, a ten gallon demijohn of 
Gibson's old Monogram — the Captain who was 
a good judge insisted on this — but they took no 
more water than would last them for two 
months, for Barbican, in accordance with the 
latest astronomical discoveries, had no doubt 
that they should find a certain quantity of water 
on the surface of the Moon. iVrdan even 
thought that they were needlessly particular re- 
garding provisions. He was quite confident that 
the Aloon was pretty nearly as well supplied 



392 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

as the Earth. In fact, if he had entertained 
strong doubts regarding such a subject, he 
would have never dreamed of taking such a 
trip at all. 

^' Besides," said he, one day while talking 
with his companions, *^ we shall not be com- 
pletely lost to our friends an the Earth, and 
they will be careful not to forgtt us.*' 

^^ Forget you! Never !'■ cried Marston sud- 
denly, and gazing mournfully at Barbican, he 
continued in a voice of doleful pitch : 

" Never, Oh never, w^hile life's in this heart. 
Shall I cease to contemplate the Moon where thou art; 
Most dear to mine eye shall her * bulwark plains ' be. 
And in every * ring mountain ' a loved face I'll see !'* 

*^ Not lost to our friends on the Earth ! What 
do you mean, Ardan ?" asked the Captain, who 
had no more poetry in his soul than an old 
boot. 

But Ardan, taking off his hat, saluted Alars- 
ton with a bow that he would scorn to give an 
emperor, and shook him warmly by the hand 
several times before he replied to McNicholl. 

'^ Nothing simpler, Captain. The Columbiad 
will be always here, ready at hand. What's to 
hinder our friends from sending us a few shell- 
loads of provisions whenever the Moon presents 



CLOSING DETAILS, 393 

herself under circumstances favorable for the 
purpose ? This being only once or twice a year, 
it would be easy for us to know when we might 
expect an arrival, and accordingly hold ourselves 
in readiness to receive it." 

'' Good ! Good ! Bully for you, Ardan !'* 
cried Marston like a man struck w^ith a sudden 
idea. ^' Well thought of ! No, my brave boys, 
you shall never be forgotten. Rely upon me 
for that !'^ 

*' Exactly what I do, Marston. I have no 
doubt that we shall hear from you regularly ; 
and certainly we must prove to be most unac- 
countably stupid if we can't hit upon some 
means of enabling you to hear from us !" 

These expressions and more in the same strain, 
inspired such general confidence that the whole 
Gun Club demanded with one voice to be al- 
lowed to accompany him to the Moon. As this, 
of course, could not be done, a Projectile Com- 
pany was formed on the spot, and empowered 
to construct even a new Columbiad if deemed 
necessary. Nothing, in fact, could be sim.pler, 
clearer, easier, more obvious, more axiomatic 
than Ardan' s idea, delivered, as it was, with a 
resolution and self-confidence inimitable in their 
sublimity. Even you yourself, my dear reader, 



394 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

should have had an exceptionally strong attach- 
ment for this miserable globe of ours, if you 
could listen to him for a few minutes without 
being seized with an uncontrollable desire to 
join the three heroes in their glorious trip to 
the Moon. 

The different articles enumerated having been 
all carefully packed and put away in their various 
receptacles, the water intended to resist the con- 
cussion was admitted into its several compart- 
ments, and the gas was compressed into a 
strong reservoir. Of the potassium chlorate and 
the caustic potash. Barbican, apprehensive of 
possible delays in the route, took a sufficient 
supply to furnish oxygen and to absorb carbonic 
acid for at least two months. An apparatus, 
self-acting and extremely ingenious, invented by 
a member of the Franklin Institute of Philadel- 
phia, was relied upon for restoring to the air 
perfect purity and all its sanitary conditions. 

Nothing more now remained to be done with 
the projectile than to deposit it safely in the 
chamber of the Columbiad — an operation exceed- 
ingly perilous and requiring the most careful 
precautions. It was carried to the summit of 
Stony Hill ; there powerful cranes, taking hold 
of it, held it suspended for some time in mid 



CLOSING DETAILS, 89p 

air over the mouth of the yawning pit. It was 
a ticklish moment. Would tie chains hold out 
under the enormous weight ? Even the break- 
ing of as much as a single link would cost at 
least a hundred thousand people their lives ! 

Happily everything worked well ; in the course 
of a few hours the projectile was quietly repos- 
ing on its terrible bed, where its pressure had 
no worse effect than to render the charge still 
more compact. 

** I've lost/' said McNicholl to Barbican, 
handing him a check on Drexel & Co. for 
three thousand dollars. Barbican was naturally 
unwilling to accept the money, circumstances 
having altered so completely since the time 
when the bets had been made ; but McNicholl 
insisted, as he wished to leave all his accounts 
in proper trim before starting on such a serious 
journey. 

** You're right, Mac, my boy," said Ardan, 
*' I like to see a man so conscientious ; only 
while your hand is in, you might as well pay 
the other two wagers." 

^' Why so?" asked McNicholl, somewhat sur- 
prised. 

*' Because it's the only way to be on the 
safe side. You either lose or win. You lose, 



396 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

you pay ; you win, nobody pays ! Besides you 
would not be there to take the money !'* 

*^ Oh ! We'll see about that/' quietly ob- 
served the matter of fact Captain. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

FIRE I 

The first of December, so long expected, at 
last arrived. On the evening of that day, at 
precisely 46 minutes and 40 seconds after 10, 
the projectile was to take its departure ; other- 
wise, it would have to wait at least eighteen 
years before the Moon presented the same favor- 
able conditions of zenith and perigee simulta- 
neously. 

The weather was magnificent ; the woods re- 
vealed the last splendors of the ^^ Indian Sum- 
mer,*' and an effulgent sun bathed in floods of 
dazzling light the beautiful world that its three 
inhabitants were on the point of leaving, of 
their own free will and accord, probably forever. 

As may be readily imagined, very few people 
enjoyed their slumbers the previous night, either 
at Tampa, Stony Hill, or any place within 
twenty miles around. The weight of protracted 
suspense many a breast felt to be rather an un- 
pleasant burden, which became only more irksome 

as the last moment approached. All hearts — 

(397) 



398 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

not excepting the iron organ that swung in 
Barbican's breast — throbbed with uneasy emotion 
— all but Ardan's. 

Cool as a cucumber, lively as a lark, the un- 
ruffled Frenchman came and went, nodding and 
smiling, chatting and bowing as usual, and 
never showing the slightest pre-occupation, or 
even more than ordinary excitement. His slum- 
bers had never been less disturbed. He slept as 
soundly as Turenne often did on a gun carriage 
the night before a battle. 

From an early hour in the morning, a count- 
less multitude covered the vast plains extending 
all around Stony Hill as far as the eye could 
reach. A double track had been laid long 
since on the little Tampa Railroad, but though 
long trains, consisting mainly of cars and loco- 
motives borrowed for the occasion from the 
northern cities, started every quarter of an hour, 
they could not accommodate half the number 
of travellers who had come from a long distance, 
and were arriving at the last moment, to witness 
the great discharge. In fact, the arrivals at 
Tampa latterly, by land and water, by horse, 
steam, and human power, had been so enormous 
that the Daily Truth Teller estimated the num- 
ber actually present within a two mile radius 



FIRE I 399 

of Stony Hill, to be very little short of five 
million souls. 

The latest arrivals could not get even within 
sight of Stony Hill, and, of course, were rather 
inclined to grumble at such a state of things. 
Was it for this that they had been for months 
on the way ? — for some had just arrived from 
Alaska, some from Chili, some from the Cape 
of Good Hope, and one had come all the way 
from Iceland. This was a schoolmaster named 
Thorvold, sent to Florida by a learned society 
of Reikiavig, not only to witness and report in 
full the world famous event, but also to settle, 
if possible, a point which at that time engaged 
the learned Scandinavians in a pretty lively con- 
troversy. He was to ascertain, by well authenti- 
cated historical remains, whether Florida was 
really and truly the country west of the Atlan- 
tic, spoken of in their ancient Sagas as having 
been discovered a thousand years ago not only 
by Norwegians, who called it IIwittra?namt/and, 
the land of the White Men — but also by Irish 
sailors, who called it Irland it Mlkla, or Great 
Ireland. As the learned gentleman spoke only 
Danish or Latin, with a strong guttural accent, 
his investigations, for a while at least, were not 
very successful. He was beset for two days by 



400 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

a New York Herald reporter, who at first took 
him for a regular diamond mine, but, not being 
able to manufacture a single item out of him, 
had at last to abandon him in despair. 

The late arrivals were obliged to suit them- 
selves to circumstances. If they could not get 
as near the hill as they wished, they had to 
be contented with getting as near as they could. 
Otherwise they had not much to complain of. 
They found themselves in the midst of a vast 
hive of human beings, well supplied with all 
the necessities of life, and even not a few of 
its luxuries. Tents, blockhouses, frame buildings, 
log huts, wigwams, adobe cabins, swarmed over 
the plains ; with little attention to picturesque 
effect, it is true, but all were arranged so as to 
form broad streets, giving ready access to sun 
and air, and admitting of the freest circulation. 

Even solidly constructed houses of brick and 
stone could be seen here and there, built by 
the learned societies for their commissioners, or 
by the rich men of the North, who, for one 
year at least, found greater attractions in science 
than in the seductions of Saratoga, New York, 
Cape May or Washington. These houses were 
so well finished, and the site in general was 
so well chosen, that Ardanstown has now become 



FIRE ! 401 

a favorite resort of the fashionable Southerners, 
and to have a neat villa there is at present 
one of the surest tests of a wealthy Tampa man's 
claim to respectability. 

We mentioned a few of the countries that 
had sent some late arrivals. But, in fact, every 
known country on the face of the earth had 
its representative at Stony Hill. Every language 
of the Five Continents resounded there at the 
same time. The top of the Rigi at sunrise in 
August — California Street in San Francisco about 
noon — the Tower of Babel half finished, was 
only a whist party in comparison to Stony Hill 
that morning. 

'* Comment ga va /" cries a lively Frenchman. 

'^ Muy Men, muchas gracias,^^ answers a poHte 
Spaniard. 

'^ Go de mar iha thu /" exclaims, smilingly a 
northern Celt. 

^^ Ha go magra guth T^ replies a southern ditto. 

'* Guten Morgen, schone Frati,^^ says a gallant 
German from Frankfort. 

^^ Hur star det till ?''^ asks a Copenhagener, 
of a friend in the crowd. 

*' Qicesta sera, mio caro,^ answers a Roman. 

*' Puri momeiz,'' says an Armenian from Bag- 
dad, busy at breakfast. 

26 



402 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

'* Rax me o* er the pourrie /*' cries an Edin- 
burgher, just commencing. 

** Ndiiu yenu kodabekee /'* asks a Hindoo 
from Arcot, just finished. 

** Mashaliah /'* cries a pious Turk from 
Smyrna, sipping a cobbler. 

^' Haidi git T^ roars a choleric one from Con- 
stantinople, at an importunate beggar. 

*^ Khayrak / Moosh owes hdgehy^ smiles a 
moon-eyed- Egyptian from Cairo. 

^^ Moot weertje^ Meeheer f^ observes a stolid 
Hollander to his neighbor for the twentieth time 
that day. 

^' Vervloekt warm, echter bees /** is the Antwer- 
per's invariable reply. 

/' Ho dromos einai pleres lesion /** swears 
an Athenian, whose pocket has been picked 
twice. 

*' O yeou git aout f^ cries an angry Vermonter, 
whose toes have been just trodden on. 

** Aly heyes ! such 'eat / such hair / such a hat- 
mosphere ! What a hox and a hass I was ever to 
leave Hingland /' ' mourns a fat Londoner with a 
blue veil over his face. 

" O pueri Americani ! Gens infanda / En 
unquam meam dulcem Islandiam iterum videbo /" 
sighs the poor Iceland Schoolmaster, very much 



FIRE I 403 

annoyed by some little urchins who are making 
fun of his long hair and uncouth garments. 

** Ich hab kein Stile k sett ge stern Abend geges- 
sen /' roars a hungry Pennsylvania Dutchman. 

*' Chin chin bow wow Ah Sin bittee P^ (Try 
my nice pork pie !) warbles a Chinese cake 
vender. 

The cries resounding that morning in Russian, 
Persian, Hebrew, Malayan, Servian, Thibetian, 
Timbuctooan, Feejeean and other interesting for- 
eign tongues we do not give at present, simply 
because our printer's stock of type is not yet quite 
as complete as those of the Lnprimerie Nationale 
in Paris, or of the Armenia?t Convent in San 
Lazaro. 

But to an eye or an ear in search of variety, 
the presence of foreigners in Stony Hill was by 
no means indispensable. The United States alone 
the ** new country,*' furnished out of its own 
vast territory, peculiarities sufficiently numerous 
and striking to attract the attention even of a 
European. The keen Bostonian, the rollicking 
New Yorker, the prim Philadelphian, the genial 
Baltimorian, the courtly Charlestonian, the gay 
Louisianian, the reckless Texan, the dashing Cali- 
fornian, with the refined St. Louis man, the self- 
satisfied Cincinnati man, the spry Chicago man. 



404 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

the gloomy looking Salt Lake City man — not 
to speak of the lawyers and the bankers, the 
doctors and the professors, the sailors and the 
fishermen, the hunters and the backwoodsmen, 
the trappers and the lumbermen, the miners and 
the steamboatmen, the Canadians, the Mexicans, 
the Newfoundlanders, the Indians — though mostly 
clad in the same monotonous black, so character- 
istic of American male attire, yet each revealing 
some distinctive mark to announce his race, or 
district, or city, or calling — all formed a scene 
endless in variety as a kaleidoscope, and ex- 
tremely interesting to the student of humanity. 

The feature, however, that would most espe- 
cially astonish our European, was the total ab- 
sence of soldiers. In Europe, we resemble mis- 
chievous schoolboys that the master cannot trust 
out of sight, and we cannot hold a large open 
air meeting without feeling instinctively that at 
any moment we are liable to be trampled to 
death by cavalry, or blown to atoms by cannon. 
It is not so in America. There they can meet 
by the millions, and never catch the first glimpse 
of a soldier. Whose fault is this ? Our rulers' 
or our own ? 

But it was in the restaurants and the bar rooms 
that the wonderful variety of American life and 



FIRE I 405 

its essential difference from ours, could be seen 
in all their perfection. In the first place, 
America is the blessed land of abundance ! No 
danger of a single individual, out of so many 
millions, dying of hunger at Stony Hill. At the 
** Free lunches " given every day in every re- 
spectable bar room, all were welcome and the 
more the merrier ! These lunches outstripped 
even the famous wedding feast of Gamacho. The 
side tables groaned beneath delicious oysters in 
every style,- fried, steamed, roasted, and on the 
shell j terrapins rich and racy ; aldermanic tur- 
tles ; not to speak of such delicacies as soft 
shell crabs, ^' black fish,'' ^^ white fish," ^^ hog 
fish," caught in the neighboring creeks abund- 
antly and almost without trouble ; canvas-back 
ducks, partridges, rail, mallards, shot almost with- 
out taking aim ; and oranges, figs, bananas, 
citrons, olives, grapes, pomegranates, watermelons, 
peaches, cantelopes, etc., all indigenous to the 
soil, and flourishing with tropical luxuriance ! 

The drinks would also excite our surprise 
by their variety, and especially by their nomen- 
clature often strange but not always quite mean- 
ingless. Besides all the ordinary liquors with 
which we Frenchmen are well acquainted, these 
Americans had drinks of their own, the exact 



406 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

composition of which, however, I must acknowl- 
edge, I could never learn. To study up the 
subject was so vast an undertaking that I con- 
fined my ambition to learning only some of their 
names. 

*^ What'll you have, gentlemen?'* cries a smart 
bar tender, to a party of five collected at the 
counter. 

'^ A whiskey straight !*' ^' A ginsling !" '^ Ben- 
zine for me!** ^' For me a sherry cobbler !** 
"1*11 take a julep, if you have any fresh mint !*' 
they all reply together, but the smart bar tender 
never misses an order or makes a single mistake. 

" Look here, old man !** roar some noisy fel- 
lows playing cards in a corner, " we want a 
bottle of strychnine !** " Pass the bug-juice 
this way !** '^ Let*s see your aqua fortis.'* 
" Send your red-eye along !** cry others in the 
neighborhood. 

" 1*11 take my morning regulator, if you 
please,** quietly observes a nice looking old gen- 
tleman with rosy gills. 

*' We want two brandy-smashes, one porter 
sangaree, one moral suasion, one phlegm-cutter, 
and one Tom and Jerry !** sing out some fast 
youths, laughing and smoking in the middle of 
the room. 



FIRE ! 407 

'* Here you are, stone fence !" cry the busy 

waiters running around, '^ one chain lightning ! 
Two stock ale ! Tanglefoot ? — Oh ! yes, sir ; 
all right ! one soda cock-tail with a stick !" 

*' Lemonade and sarsaparilla for ten !" cries a 
temperance party from Massachusetts. 

^' A bottle of Gibson's Monogram !" cries a 
couple of comfortable merchants from Pittsburg. 

'' Old Rye !" ^' Bourbon !" " Soda water and 
Catawba !" ^' Scuppernong !" resound from vari- 
ous parts of the room. 

^' Here you are, ginger pop !" the waiters go 
on, as they hurry from table to table j ^^ who said 
a Rocky Mountain sneezer ? All right, sir. Root 
beer ? No, sirree. White beer ? Coffee ? No 
such stuff here ! Get them in the temperance 
house around the corner. Eye-opener ? Yes, 
sir. Rum punch for two ! One glass Plantation 
Bitters ! California champagne ! who said Cali- 
fornia champagne ?" Etc., etc., etc. 

Cries of this kind, however, were exceedingly 
rare on the morning of the first of December. 
Even at Delmonico's restaurant, a branch of the 
famous New York house, and the resort of all 
gourmands affecting an esthetic taste, not a sin- 
gle guest could be found after ten o'clock. At 
four in the afternoon, among the millions of as- 



408 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

sembled spectators, not a single one thought of 
going to dinner, though they had taken nothing 
since an early breakfast, except the bread, cheese, 
and crackers, sold at the stands ; or sausages and 
pies of dubious composition, furnished by peripa- 
tetic venders. 

It was just the same with the drinking. The 
bar rooms were as silent as the grave. They re- 
minded you a little of Philadelphia on election 
day, or Massachusetts under the Maine Liquor 
Law, where, if you want a drink, you have to 
slip in by the back door and sneak down a cel- 
lar. Even this resource you would not have in 
Stony Hill after twelve o'clock. The colic 
might twist you into a corkscrew, you might be 
getting livid from the bite of ten rattlesnakes — no 
help but to grin and bear it. Landlords, barkeep- 
ers, waiters, even the drug clerks had all shut 
up shop and run off to see the ^^ big shoot.'' 

Even the gambling rooms were abandoned. 
For the last month or two, the ^' Casinos,'* the 
^' Crockfords,'' and the *' Tattersalls" had never 
been closed night or day. Not for one hour out 
of the twenty-four had the billiard balls ceased 
clicking, the ten pins getting knocked over, or 
the bells stopped ringing in the shooting gal- 
leries. In every tent, hotel, restaurant, " club 



FIRE I 409 

house," '' casino*' or '^ sample room/' where 
gambling went on, you could find all the rooms 
full of parties deeply immersed in the mysteries 
of *' old sledge," '* high low jack," '^ poker," 
^' bluff," ^* euchre," '^ pharaoh," ^^ monte," 
^^ keno," and the other well known games. 
But now the cards lay idly in confused piles, 
the dice rested innocently in the casters, 
the counters in their drawers, the roulette 
balls in their holes, the rakes raked in no 
greenbacks, and the seductive voice of the Crou- 
pier^ '* Make your game, gentlemen," was heard 
no more. Croupier, dealer, stool pigeon, victim, 
professional, amateur, decoyer, decoyed — all sud- 
denly discovered that even the goddess of gamb- 
ling could lose her fascinations, and after sev- 
eral ineffectual attempts to proceed, they had 
concluded to suspend their game until the con- 
clusion of the overpowering catastrophe that 
was now so close at hand. 

All through and all over the feverishly ex- 
cited multitude, standing quietly on the vast 
plain surrounding Stony Hill, a kind of con- 
fused humming murmur had been heard rising 
and sinking all day long, like the fitful sound 
of a distant waterfall when a soft wind is 
blowing. There is something mysterious about 



410 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

this humming murmur. It is said that you can 
always tell when you are in the immediate neigh- 
borhood of a great assemblage of human beings 
by a peculiar sound emitted by the mass, though 
individually they all keep perfect silence. In 
the Virginia campaigns, bodies of Northern 
troops, marching at midnight, readily felt that 
a certain wood was full of Confederates, though 
they all lay as still there as so many dead logs. 
Their very thoughts, as it were, rose in the air 
and rendered it vocal, as with the hum of dis- 
embodied spirits. The sentinels, it is even said, 
could always tell when the next day's battle 
was to be an unusually bloody one, by the 
peculiar noises heard only the previous night, 
and plainly distinguishable in both camps. 

A feeling like this, or rather such a sensation 
as we can easily imagine the Pompeians to have 
experienced a few hours before the eruption of 
Vesuvius overwhelmed their beautiful city in 
irremediable ruin, now pervaded the countless 
multitudes around Stony Hill. An indefinable 
emotion of awe and terror oppressed every 
heart. The boldest held their breath and silently 
wished it was all over. 

By seven o'clock this feeling had grown to 
such an intensity, that it could not possibly 



FIRE I 411 

last any longer. It had to change or people 
would sink under its effects. Fortunately, just 
at this moment, the sight of the full Moon 
rising in the purpling eastern sky, large, silvery, 
serene, brought about the most welcome and 
needed reaction. She was hailed with the most 
enthusiastic cheers. Never before had the ^' Lady 
Moon^* looked so beautiful. Never on her great 
festivals amidst the hills of Hindostan had she 
witnessed more enthusiasm among her countless 
worshippers. Never even had a grander choral 
hymn risen from the host of while robed priests 
moving solemnly around the wondrous temple 
of Ephesus, chanting the glories of the Cres- 
cent goddess ! 

Higher and higher she ascended, brighter and 
brighter she beamed, beautiful and more beau- 
tiful she looked ; whilst louder, fiercer, wilder, 
more passionate, more delirious rose the ma- 
jestic diapason of the myriad voiced army, that 
stretched away for miles around the base of 
Stony Hill ! The women, children, and old 
men left behind in Tampa, twenty miles dis- 
tant, heard the roaring distinctly, and said it 
resembled the singing of* the telegraph wires on 
a keen windy day in winter. 

A high platform — '* shaped like a gallows," 



412 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

as somebody said — had been erected beside the 
mouth of the pit. It was reached by a long 
straight ladder, and up this ladder, at eight 
o'clock precisely, the three intrepid travellers 
were seen ascending. Their appearance was the 
signal for cheers fully as loud as ever, though 
by this time lungs were becoming exhausted and 
throats husky. The three black forms stood 
for a while calmly gazing around them, appar- 
ently taking a last farewell of the faces of 
their kind, and of the fields of their dear sweet 
old mother Earth. Happy were the spectators 
that stood on the southwest side ! Being in a 
line with the full Moon and the platform, they 
could easily follow every movement of the daunt- 
less men, thus thrown in the strongest relief on 
the brilliant background. 

By degrees all sounds ceased ; everybody, as 
if by mutual consent, wanted to hear the last 
words uttered by such men. Nobody seemed 
to be aware that the lungs even of a Stentor 
could not make a voice audible to the tenth 
part of such a mass. Nevertheless, all shouting 
ceased, and the roar of many voices was sud- 
denly succeeded by the silence of an Arctic 
midnight. 

Just then, a young German poet, assisted by 



FIRE! 413 

the Mannerchor of Philadelphia, commenced to 
sing a hymn of his own composition, entitled 
Arion's Sebetro^I jur Srbe I — Farewell to Earth I — 
It was a very beautiful composition, exceedingly 
appropriate, and the Mannerchor men never sang 
more sweetly or with better expression. But 
the Americans, not understanding either the 
words or the air, naturally concluded that the 
Germans were singing a Dutch version' of the 
Star Spangled Bamter^ especially as that majes- 
tic air serves themselves admirably on all occa- 
sions when they wish to express musically high- 
wrought intensity of feeling. 

What more natural, therefore, than that the 
Sons of Columbia should suddenly break out into 
that song, that it should be caught up by the 
next circle, and the next, and the next, till it 
reached the outermost verge of the vast multi- 
tude two miles off ! Even the men on the 
platform took their part in singing the mighty 
chorus, and Ardan could be distinctly seen 
beating time with both arms, and displaying all 
the grace, masterliness, and power of a Jullien. 
His happy thought added immensely to the 
effect of the refrain, the two lines of which 
require very considerable variation in the move- 
ment, the first being rather quick, and the 



414 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

second not only very slow but demanding nicely 
graduated shades of retardation : 

" And the Star-spangled Banner in triumph shall wave. 
O'er the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave !** 

At the word Free ! the voice was the roar of 
a mighty people rising against the insolence of 
a haughty tyrant ; at the word Brave ! the same 
voice, whilst proclaiming its satisfaction with the 
turn that things had taken, hinted plainly un- 
dying readiness to fight the same battles over 
again. Such feelings were, of course, rather 
out of place in the present instance, but in 
moments of intense excitement our judgments 
are not very discriminating, and when a fierce 
fever burns our hearts, it is not very particular 
as to the manner in which it may find vent. 

With the last words of the hymn, the three 
travellers disappeared from the platform ; the 
fatal moment was approaching, an uneasy sense 
of terror once more took possession of all hearts 
and silence reigned supreme. 

The heroes of the evening were immediately 
surrounded by the members of the Gun Club 
and by the representatives of many learned 
societies from various parts of the world. Bar- 
bican received them all with perfect politeness, 



FIRE / 415 

and gave his last directions as coolly as he 
would order a cab. McNicholl, with calm coun- 
tenance, eyes resigned, lips closed, and hands 
clenched behind his back, walked towards the 
mouth of the pit almost as tranquilly as a Chris- 
tian martyr ever approached the Coliseum, where 
he heard the lions roaring and the mob yelling. 
As for Ardan, gay and happy as ever, you 
would think he was going to a friend's wed- 
ding, or rather, starting on a pleasant excursion 
to the mountains. Dressed in a tourist's suit 
of tweed, a satchel slung under one arm, a 
telescope under the other, in his left hand he 
held a dressing case, and with his right he dis- 
tributed the warmest Good Bye f s to the thou- 
sands throngmg around him. Lively and buoy- 
ant as usual, he was in the best possible spirits, 
laughing, cracking jokes, punching Marston in 
the ribs and tipping his hat over his eyes, 
"to cheer him up,'* as he said, *^- and to make 
him look like himself." But poor Marston 
could not see the point of his jokes, and was 
more inclined to cry than to laugh. 

The great bell now struck ten o'clock. 

In the ears of many, it sounded with a melan- 
choly wail, as if tolling the funeral knell of those 
who were never again to hear a bell's sweet 



416 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

chime in this world. In less than three-quarters 
of an hour they were to be flying like meteors 
through the boundless regions of space ! 

As some time would be required for getting 
the hoisting apparatus ready, clearing away the 
scaffolding from the mouth of the pit, and also 
for screwing down tightly the plate that covered 
the trap hole, the moment had now come for the 
travellers to take their places in the Columbiad. 
Murphy having had the charge of firing off the 
gun by means of the electric spark, Barbican very 
carefully regulated his watch to the tenth part of 
a second by the engineer's chronometer, in order 
that the travellers, when shut up in the projec- 
tile, might be able to follow with their eyes the 
movements of the second-hand as it marched im- 
passively over the dial to the terrible instant of 
departure. 

The touching moment for the last farewell was 
now come, and the bravest felt their eyes mois- 
ten. Even Ardan's 7?iof was a failure, and his 
laugh hysterical. Poor Marston was quite over- 
come, and wept like a child while he held his 
dear friend's hand in both his own. *^ Let me 
go with you !'* he whispered hoarsely j ^^ it is 
not yet too late !" '^ Impossible ! my dear old 
boy !" said Barbican, shaking his friend's artifi- 



FIRE I 417 

cial hands most heartily, but with a voice 
firm as chilled steel, and eyes dry as unslaked 
lime. 

In a few minutes more, the three companions, 
lowered into the projectile through the trap hole, 
have closed the door after them, and fastened it 
on the inside by means of a screw of immense 
power. 

The workmen cleared away the scaffolding rap- 
idly from the mouth of the Columbiad, and the 
black chasm was soon able to look with unob- 
structed range directly into the Zenith. 

The three daring men are now walled up ir- 
revocably, hermetically sealed in their awful but 
self-chosen mausoleum ! 

It is a moment of profound emotion, rapidly 
approaching its climax. 

All those who had been privileged to come 
within the enclosure, now, according to a pre- 
concerted arrangement, withdraw,- rapidly and 
noiselessly, to a circle drawn around the pit at a 
distance of six hundred and sixty feet. No in- 
ducement can compel them to go further back. 

Death- like stillness within the enclosure, death- 
like stillness without. Every "man among the mil- 
lions is silent as yonder Moon, now treading her 

peaceful way through the hushed hosts of solemn 
27 



418 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

Stars ; every man is quieting even the uneasy 
fluttering of his heart. 

Yet those inside the enclosure easily hear the 
presence of the myriads outside ; it floats on their 
ears like the mysterious murmurings of a smooth- 
lipped shell, or like the far-off echo of a storm 
raging in 

" The wild woods of Broceliande !" 

Or rather, Life reveals itself unto Life by 
means independent of our ordinary senses, and 
never dreamt of in our philosophy. 

Higher and higher rises the Moon, occulting 
some stars, extinguishing others by the splendor 
of her beams. She has just left the constellation 
Cancer, and is now rapidly approaching Pollux, 
the less brilliant of the Twins. Consequently, 
though she is only half way on her journey to 
the Zenith, the bullet destined to hit her is to be 
discharged in a minute or two, as . the sports- 
man always aims a little ahead of the bird that 
he intends to kill. 

The death-like universal hush stills prevails. 
Not even a breath of wind steals through the 
leaves of the forest. No sound is heard, except 
the indescribable voice of 

** Life speaking unto Life/ 



FIRE ! 419 

like the whisper of the snowy avalanche echoing 
from the distant peaks of the Jungfrau. 

All eyes are turned in one direction, the cen- 
tral focus of thousands of concentric circles. 

Murphy never takes his eye off the hands of 
his chronometer. Of the forty seconds still to 
elapse, each one seems a century. 

His voice can be heard counting *' one,** 
'* two,'* " three,'* etc., with the regularity of a 
great pendulum beating seconds in a cathedral 
tower. 

At ^* twenty ** a universal thrill darts through 
the thousands that are within earshot. The same 
idea flashes on them simultaneously. With what 
anxiety are the travellers, shut up in the projec- 
tile, also counting those terrible seconds ! A few 
suppressed cries are heard, as several fall over in 
a fainting fit. 

'' Thirty-five V '' Thirty-six !'* '' Thirty-seven !*' 
" Thirty-eight !** '' Thirty-nine !*' " Forty !*' 

^* FIRE ! !*' 

Touching the button, Murphy closes the con- 
nection, and sends the electric current into the 
heart of the Columbiad. 

The unearthly, ear-piercing, drum-rending, 
brain-shattering roar that follows his words we 
must not attempt to describe. 



420 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

Everybody instantly feels as if struck on the 
head by a hundred pound weight, or, still more 
agonizingly, as if his heart was torn asunder 
by blunt nippers. Many faint from the pain, 
and they are the fortunate ones. Most of them 
have never quite recovered from the shock, and 
are troubled ever since by a distressful singing 
in the ears. Those who have heard the explo- 
sion of a powder magazine, or of a mine blow- 
ing up a bastion, or of an earthquake swallow- 
ing up a great city, may form some idea of 
the nature of the terrific noise. None else need 
try ; nor should they be sorry ; there is a kind 
of experience of which the less you know the 
better. 

Instantaneously with the report, a pillar of flame 
darts up into the sky, half a mile in height. 
The earth shakes with appalling violence, and 
very few indeed of the countless spectators have 
sense enough left to catch the slightest glimpse 
of the projectile as it shoots rapidly upwards 
amidst the dazzling, blinding, blasting glare 1 




FIRE. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

CLOUDY WEATHER. 

The crowds of women, children, old men, 
and others belonging to the " can't get away 
club," who lined the streets of Tampa that 
night, thronged its housetops, and filled the 
decks and yards of every vessel in the harbor, 
though twenty miles distant from the scene of 
action, heard the great explosion distinctly and 
felt the earth quiver beneath their feet. But 
a minute or so before the arrival either of sound 
or shock, the red blaze of the flash had burst on 
their eyes with a suddenness that was painfully 
appalling. For an instant everything shone as 
bright as under a blinding sun ; then immedi- 
ate darkness, black, pitchy, profound, cavern- 
ous. While still lost in wonder and trying to 
recover their dazzled sight, they suddenly heard 
the crashing sound of the explosion roaring all 
around them, and at the same instant a fright- 
lul tempest swept over their heads, shrieking 
like a typhoon. The children screamed, the 

women fainted, the men alternately prayed and 

(421) 



422 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

swore, while the earth heaved like a ship at 
sea. Many high houses visibly nodded. Sev- 
eral gas chimneys toppled over. St. Mary's 
Church, a new building not quite finished, on 
the corner of Washington and St. Augustine 
streets, fell in, and of the new Bonded Ware- 
house with the French roof, nothing but a 
shapeless mass of ruins could be seen next 
morning. You could have easily imagined 
yourself at Lisbon in 1755 or at San Salvador 
in 1854. 

Even the vessels in the harbor did not all 
escape serious damage. Some of them, driven 
together, shipped water and sunk ; more that 
were anchored further out, snapped their cables 
like pack-thread and were tossed up high and 
dry on the western shore. 

But the flash, the shock and the storm at- 
tendant on the explosion revealed themselves far 
beyond Tampa. 

Far out at sea, both in the Atlantic and the 
Gulf, the resplendent coruscation of the blaze 
was distinctly seen, and more than one captain, 
forgetful of the Columbiad, marked on his log 
book the sudden appearance of a gigantic 
meteor. 

The earthquake made itself felt in every part 



CLOUDY WEATHER. 423 

of Florida; but, as may be readily supposed, 
it was of the storm that most notice was taken 
and by it most damage was done. The gases, 
liberated from the powder and rarefied still more 
by the heat, struck with instant and terrific vio- 
lence the surrounding volume of the atmosphere, 
and sent it roaring in all directions, almost as 
destructive in its course as the dreaded cyclone 
of the West Indies. 

The worst effects of this sudden concussion were 
felt, of course, at Stony Hill. Not a man had 
been able to maintain his footing. All had 
fallen before the blast, like a field of wheat 
beaten down by a storm. The fright and confu- 
sion were terrible, and many were seriously hurt. 
Those in the front rank, having to bear the 
first brunt of the shock, naturally suffered most. 
Unlucky Marston, as usual nearer to . danger 
than anybody else, had been caught up like a 
straw and whirled violently, head over heels, 
for twenty yards or so above the heads of the 
crowd behind him. For a few minutes, almost 
all were completely deprived of sight as well 
as hearing, and to this day many have never 
quite recovered from the terrible shock that at 
once affected' their eyes, their ears, and their ner- 
vous system in general. 



424 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

The hurricane, having prostrated everybody 
at Stony Hill, overthrowing some of the most 
solid edifices, uprooting the forest trees, strew- 
ing with desolation everything within a radius 
of twenty miles, sending the trains flying back 
to Tampa in better time than they had ever 
made before, and bursting on that town with 
the results already given, had extended its cir- 
cle still further, far beyond the limits of the 
United States. The terrible atmospheric com- 
motion, aided by a west wind blowing at the 
time on the Atlantic, gave rise even to a sudden 
and therefore unforeseen storm at sea. It burst 
with extreme violence on a number of vessels 
that happened to be sailing a little north of the 
Bahama Islands. Some of them lost their masts, 
more had their captains washed overboard, and 
one in particular, a fine English merchant ves- 
sel, the Montezuma^ Fitzroy master, engaged in 
the cochineal and mahogany trade between 
Balize and Liverpool, was so seriously injured 
as to founder and prove a total wreck, though 
fortunately the crew was saved. 

It was the loss of this vessel, as my readers 
no doubt remember, that for a long time pre- 
sented such a serious obstacle to the settlement 
of the Alabama Claims. England insisted that 



CLOUDY WEATHER, 425 

the American Government was responsible on 
account of having allowed the explosion to take 
place ; the Americans grounded their resistance 
on England's own favorite strong point : No 
indirect damages ! 

For the next and last instance that I shall 
give to show the prodigious effects of the great 
catastrophe in Florida, I cannot vouch, as I 
have no better authority for the story than the 
testimony of two colored natives of Sierra 
Leone, in Africa. According to their statement, 
which I take from a letter in the Times — ad- 
dressed to the editor by the Mayor of Sierra 
Leone — the inhabitants of that country and the 
neighboring regions of Liberia, on the night of 
the first of December — probably about half an hour 
after the- departure of the projectile — heard dis- 
tinctly a faint rumbling like distant thunder in 
the west, though the night was exceedingly 
calm and the sky clear. This must have been 
the last reverberation of the sound waves, which 
crossing the Atlantic, thus broke on the African 
shore. 

Let us return to Stony Hill. The first moment 
of awful terror and appalling confusion over, the 
deafened, the dazzled, the thunder struck — the 
whole mass, in fact — recovering their senses and 



426 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

rising to their feet, rent the heavens with one 
shout • 

" Hurrah ! Hurrah for Ardan, Barbican and 
McNicholl ! Hurrah !'* 

Then all who had already provided themselves, 
whipped out their telescopes, opera glasses, spy- 
glasses, or spectacles — every pain, trouble and 
emotion completely forgotten for the moment 
in the all-absorbing, all-embracing desire to rec- 
onnoitre the sky in search of the projectile. 
But they searched in vain. Not the slightest 
glimpse of it could they perceive, and they 
were beginning to reconcile themselves to the 
idea of waiting for an early telegram from Long's 
Peak, where Professor Belfast, of Cambridge Ob- 
servatory, had previously taken his post, attended 
by a staff ordered to make the most diligent 
and persevering observations. 

But a phenomenon, totally unexpected — yet 
natural enough when people began to reflect 
about it — suddenly came to try their patience 
in a most tantalizing manner. The weather, 
hitherto superb, all at once changed ; the clouds 
began to collect on the darkened sky ; the stars 
disappeared ; and even the Moon could not 
send her light through the dense mist. How 
could it be otherwise ? Should not the instanta- 



CLOUDY WEATHER. 427 

neoiis deflagration of 400 thousand pounds of 
gun cotton have produced a terrific displacement 
of the atmospheric strata, and the liberation of 
an enormous mass of vapor ? The whole order 
of nature had been thrown into confusion. The 
Americans themselves should have been the first 
to expect the sudden change. Had they not 
learned by the bitter experience of several years, 
that great battles are always followed by violent 
atmospheric disturbances ? 

The darkness soon became so great that neither 
ISIoon nor star was visible, and the millions of 
observers, considering it useless to struggle any 
longer against what was evidently beyond 
their control, shut up their telescopes, and re- 
tired to take what rest they could after a day 
and a night of such unparalleled excitement. , 

Next day the state of things was no better. ' 
The Sun even did not show himself. Thick, 
heavy, dusky clouds formed an impenetrable 
screen between earth and sky, and, unfortunately, 
the hazy weather, borne on the wings of a north- 
easter, soon overspread the whole continent, 
reaching even the summits of the Rocky ]\Ioun- 
tains. What a fatality ! The only interesting 
news in the papers that day — after the telegraphic 
summary of the proceedings — was the weather re- 



428 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB 

port, and even that soon lost its attraction by 
its unvarying monotony. In the north, cloudy ; 
in the east, hazy ; in the south, misty ; in the 
west foggy. '' Dire was the tossing, deep the 
groans.*' All over the land, the voice of the 
grumbler was heard to complain. All the Mrs. 
Partingtons of the country exclaimed bitterly 
against ^' Old Probs/' the weather man in Wash- 
ington, and demanded his instant removal. He 
was not, however, without friends who readily 
took his part. Had not the great explosion, 
they asked, for the time being put the weather 
altogether beyond his control ? If Nature was 
indignant at the unwarrantable liberties taken 
with her orderly and in general smooth-working 
operations, what else could be expected ? Be- 
sides, they added very sensibly, supposing the 
day were one of the finest that ever gladdened 
the earth, where would be the advantage ? The 
projectile could not possibly be seen, as, in con- 
sequence of the earth's rotation, it was by that 
time vertical to their Antipodes in Western Aus- 
tralia, or somewhere in the South Sea. 

In this unsatisfactory manner the first day ended, 
and the night brought no improvement. The 
clouds were denser and darker than ever, and the 
Moon never showed herself even once. Many 



I 



CLOUDY WEATHER. 429 

people said, "half in earnest, that she was angry 
at being shot at, and that they had seen the last 
of her. Not a single observation was possible, 
and the dispatches from Long's Peak, still the 
melancholy burden bore of : 

** Altitude of Station, 14,000 feet. Thermometer 40. 
Barometer falling. Weather threatening. Wind E. N. 
E." 

Next day, the appearance of some thoughtful, 
well written articles in the Boston Fost, the JVew 
York World, the Philadelphia Ledger, and other 
leading papers in the country, had a very tran- 
quillizing effect. They showed very conclusively 
that, so far, there was no reason for dissatisfac- 
tion ; the experiment might have possibly suc- 
ceeded ; the probabilities, even, were decidedly 
on the affirmative side \ it would be time to 
despair only when positive proof was furnished 
to the contrary ; the projectile could not 
possibly reach the Moon until the 5 th at mid- 
night ; on account of the small size of the shell 
it was impossible to follow its track ; in two 
days more it would show itself on the surface of 
the Moon, like a little black spot ; and in the 
meantime their readers should keep themselves as 
cool and as patient as possible. 



430 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

This advice was generally followed, and pub- 
lic impatience kept itself within reasonable bounds 
for the next two days ; but when the midnight 
of the 5th showed itself as cloudy as ever, and 
obstinately refused to let even a star be seen, 
the general exasperation reached a very danger- 
ous pitch. ^* Old Probs*' was bitterly denounced 
as the worst kind of a ^* fraud,'* so that even 
his warmest defenders had not a word to say 
for him. 

The Moon herself came in for as good a share 
of defamation and scurrility as if she had been 
an unpopular General, or a President unable to 
command a majority in Congress. A catching, 
but not over decent, lampoon on the subject, 
published the very next morning by a New York 
journal of civilization, had an enormous success, 
and the clever artist, who dashed it off in five 
minutes, was at once pronounced to be beyond 
all odds the greatest caricaturist of the nineteenth 
century. 

Alas, poor human nature ! In the first mo- 
ments of our dissatisfaction, how often do we 
madly smash to pieces to-day the gods we wor- 
shipped yesterday with so much fear and tremb- 
ling ! Only a week ago, ^w^ minutes after 
the appearance of such a cartoon, the great cari- 



) 



CLOUDY WEATHER. 431 

caturist would be dangling from the nearest 
lamp post. 

Marston was by this time more than half way 
to Long's Peak, for which point he had started 
at an early hour on December 2d, though con- 
siderably bruised and shaken by the terrible ex- 
plosion. He wished to make his own observa- 
tions. On the road he heard all kinds of ru- 
mors, but his brave heart never despaired. He 
believed too firmly in Barbican to harbor for an 
instant a doubt regarding his success. Besides, 
amidst all the startling rumors that, as usual in 
times of uncertainty, were flying about by the 
thousand, no report had as yet come of the pro- 
jectile having fallen back on any of the continents 
or islands of our globe. The worthy fellow 
would not admit for an instant the possibility of 
its having fallen into the ocean, notwithstand- 
ing the fact that the surface of the water is 
three times greater than that of the land. 

December 6th. Weather still cloudy. The 
morning papers announced among the other cable 
news, that the great telescopes of the old world, 
Lord Rosse's in Ireland, Sir John Herschel's 
in England, Foucault's in France, Father Secchi's 
in Rome, that of Konigsberg in Prussia, and that 
of Pulkova near St. Petersburg, were continually 



432 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

directed day and night on the surface of the 
Moon when visible. This was ahiiost continuously 
from her rising to her setting, for, contrary to 
the state of things in America, the weather 
throughout Europe was magnificent and highly 
favorable for observation. However, from the 
comparatively small size of those instruments, no 
satisfactory result could as yet be positively re- 
ported. 

December 7th. No change. Europe, even 
Asia and Africa, began to share in the impa- 
tience of the United States. In spite of the 
action of the Greenwich Observatory, the English 
people had become intensely interested in the 
subject, and the Times was flooded with the 
wildest projects, gratuitously offered to the 
Americans, for dispersing the clouds accumu- 
lated over the surface of the United States. 

December 8th. The wind having changed a 
little, the sky seemed disposed to break, but in 
a few hours all hopes were again mercilessly 
dashed to earth by another change in the wind, 
and the night that followed was no improve- 
ment whatever on the previous week. 

Matters were now beginning to look serious. 
The Moon was to enter her last quarter on the 
12th ; thenceforward her light would go on 



CLOUD y WE A THER. 433 

declining so considerably that even the clearest 
sky would afford little opportunity for observa- 
tion. In fact, a week later, she would set 
and rise with the sun, in whose rays she would 
become for some time absolutely invisible. In 
such a case, the only possible resource left 
would be to wait till the beginning of January, 
when, being once more at her full, she could 
be observed with some advantage. 

Consoling reflections of this nature began to 
appear in the morning papers, who, moreover, 
preached eloquent sermons on patience, easily 
proving it to be the greatest of all Christian 
virtues. 

December 9th. '^ Falling barometer, cloudy 
weather, with areas of light rain, turning to snow 
in the Northern and Middle States.'' Old Probs. 

December loth. The sun showed himself oc- 
casionally, but at short intervals and among 
watery clouds, as if to tantalize folks ; besides 
the east and southeast winds still prevalent were 
charged with too much moisture to allow the 
telescopes to be used. 

December nth. No change. "All quiet along 
the Potomac !'' as the Herald expressed it, 
alluding to a stereotyped phrase often heard in 
the early years of the great Civil War. 



434 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

The Herald'' s little joke fell on deaf ears ; or 
rather it caused some irritation ; an impatient 
man cannot relish jokes, and the impatience of 
the public at large had by this time exceeded 
all bounds. 

At last, on the 12th, one of those frightful 
storms that are seldom witnessed out of tropical 
regions, burst on the United States. It came 
from the southwest and blew all day with fear- 
ful violence, turning quite cold towards evening. 
Every cloud vanished from the blue sky ; the 
stars came out in all their splendor ; and 
the Moon, with only half her disc visible, but 
still as bright, beautiful, and glorious as ever, 
made her appearance about two hours after mid- 
night, and moved serenely once more through 
the glittering constellations that spangled the 
face of heaven. 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

A NEW STAR. 

On that very night, or rather morning, though 
long before daylight, bells, guns, cannons, and 
*' extras'' roused up people suddenly from their 
slumbers, and an astounding piece of intelli- 
gence burst like a thunderbolt on every part of 
the Union. 

The Projectile had been seen ! ! 

It is needless to say that the Atlantic Cable 
instantly flashed the news to all parts of Europe, 
in fact to all parts of the world within reach 
of telegraphic communication. 

The morning papers having made up their 
forms before the arrival of the telegram, not 
one of them contained it. The *^ extras,*' 
therefore, went off by millions, but the public 
had been too often victimized by bogus dis- 
patches during the war to trust implicitly to 
anything short of the official announcement. 
Here it is word for word, forwarded a few 

hours later by Professor Belfast. As will be 

(435) 



436 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

seen, it contains the learned gentleman's final 
conclusions regarding the ultimate issue of the 
Gun Club's famous experiment. 

Long's Peak, C. T., D.c, 13. 

** To the Eegents of the Smithsonian 

Institute, Washington, D. C. : 

*' Gentlemen : 

'' I have the honor to inform you that the projectile, 
discharged by the Cohimbiad at Stony Hill, has been 
perceived this .morning at three (3) hours, twenty-seven (27) 
minutes, and thirty-six (36) seconds after midnight, by 
Messrs. McConnel and Belfast, of the Cambridge As- 
tronomical staff, at present on active but temporary ser- 
vice at this Observatory. 

" The projectile has not reached its destination. It 
is passing on one side, near enough however to be af- 
fected by the Lunar attraction. 

" Its rectilinear motion having become circular in 
obedience to the two forces by which it is actuated, 
it has been compelled to follow an elliptical orbit 
around the Moon, thereby becoming substantially her 
satellite. 

" T he elements of this new heavenly body we have not 
as yet succeeded in determining, as neither her actual 
velocity nor the precise amount of the Moon's attrac- 
tion has been sufficiently calculated. Her mean distance, 
however, from the Lunar surface may be roughly esti- 
mated at 2,333 n^iles. 

" Now, in this state of things, two different results 



A NEW STAR. 437 

may occur, each of which would produce a very con- 
siderable modification. 

" I. Either the Lunar attraction will finally prevail, 
in which case the travellers will effect their purpose ; 

** 2. Or, kept continually whirling In the immutable 
path of its orbit, the projectile will go on revolving for 
ever around the Moon until the end of time. 

*' Which of these two hypotheses, the only ones pos- 
sible, will prove the true one, observations alone can 
and will determine, but, so far, the Gun Club's experi- 
ment has been attended with no other result, than pre- 
senting our Solar system with one more heavenly body 

" All of which is respectfully submitted. 

" J. M. Belfast, 

" Director r 

With what breathless eagerness this dispatch 
was read in the evening papers ! What an in- 
finite number of startling questions was called 
forth by this totally unexpected denouemefit ! 
What investigations of a palpitating interest 
should henceforth await the watchful eye of 
science 1 A great problem had been resolved, 
marking a new era in the world's annals, and, 
like the discovery of America, destined to 
modify our history forever. Thanks to the 
courage and the sublime devotion of three men, 
the enterprise of sending a bullet to the Moon, 
instead of being put off to future ages, like 



438 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

Other so called Quixotic projects, was now a 
living, accomplished fact. Its consequences de- 
fied all human calculation. The travellers, shut 
up in the new satellite, might perhaps never 
exactly attain their purpose, but at least they 
would form part of the Lunar world. They 
would gravitate around the mysterious Queen 
of the Night, and, for the first time direct the 
unaided eye of man into the dark mysteries of 
her surface. The names of Barbican, McNichoU 
and Ardan should be henceforth and forever 
written in letters of living light on the brightest 
pages of astronomical research. In the far off 
ages of the future, when so many other illustri- 
ous names shall be extinguished in the black 
waters of oblivion, these three men shall stand 
forth as the representatives of an age of profound 
investigation, most pains-taking industry, and un- 
paralleled audacity. It was only such an age 
that could have given birth to explorers so dar- 
ing, engineers so accomplished, and lovers of 
abstract science so singularly pure and unsel- 
fish ! 

It must be acknowledged, however, that lofty 
sentiments of this kind were confined to the 
scientific, the learned, the aesthetic, the cultured 
classes — in other words, to the few. The world 



A NEW STAR. 439 

at large heard the result with a cry of horror, 
surprise, and profound sorrow. Could not some- 
thing be done to deliver those dauntless heroes 
from their appalling situation? Come to the res- 
cue, scientific men ! Now is the time to show the 
value of your boasted knowledge ! Do some- 
thing for the bravest hearts that ever beat within 
your ranks ! But the scientific men shook their 
heads hopelessly. Nothing could be done. 
These daring spirits had, of their own free will, 
transgressed a great law of nature and nature's God, 
and therefore should abide by the consequences 
of putting themselves out of humanity's reach. 
They had air enough for two months. They had 
provisions enough for a year. ^' And after 
that ?" shrieked the sorrowing world, wringing 
its hands in despair. ** Oh ! what after that ?" 

But to this terrible question, the most scien- 
tific of the scientific men gave no more satisfac- 
tory answer than an ominous shake of the head. 

One man alone never lost courage, one man 
alone never considered the situation desperate. 
By the force of his intense friendship for Barbi- 
can, and profound admiration for Ardan, he had 
come to partake of the force of character of 
both. JVil desperandum I — Never give up the 
ship ! — Quand ineme ! — What of it ? — the death- 



440 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB, 

less mottoes of his vanished friends had now be- 
come completely and inseparably his own. 
Need I say that this man was Marston ? 

As said before, he had started on the 2d, but 
though he travelled day and night and performed 
miracles of locomotion, he could not accom- 
plish a journey of considerably more than two 
thousand miles in less than ten days. Not arriv- 
ing at Long's Peak until the morning after the 
reported discovery, he had consequently suf- 
fered the profound grief of being too late to 
catch a glimpse of the projectile. 

But his resolution was immediately taken. 
Until that projectile would again become visi- 
ble, and as long as it would continue visi- 
ble on the Lunar disc, so long would he con- 
tinue solid and determined, at his post Reside 
the great telescope of the Rocky Mountains. 
All other thoughts, hopes and emotions were to 
be henceforth concentrated into one single un- 
interrupted operation : to watch for the projec- 
tile that contained his three friends. The in- 
stant the Moon again appeared, he framed her 
in the mirror of his great reflector, and never 
lost sight of her from the moment she rose in 
the eastern sky until she sank behind the 
snowy peaks in the west. It need hardly be 




MARSTON AT HIS POST. 



A NEIV STAR. 441 

said that his eye sought continually the little 
black spot that Belfast had reported as seen 
crossing her silvery disc. Sometimes he im- 
agined he saw it, but in an instant it would 
completely disappear. This he naturally at- 
tributed to his want of experience in taking 
observations with large telescopes, though Bel- 
fast seemed to consider it to be owing to the 
diminished size of the Moon's surface. He saw 
enough, however, to convince him that his 
friends were still safe, and, although Belfast soon 
began to entertain serious doubts on the matter, 
he would never admit the remotest possibility 
of losing them. 

^^ No, no," he would soliloquize, when Bel- 
fast had retired after a hot discussion regard- 
ing the identity of the black spot and the 
projectile. *' No danger of the Boys ! Tlieir 
heads are too level ! Correspond with them ? Of 
course we shall. It's only a question of time. 
And they will correspond with us. Won't you, 
Boys ? How are you up there ? Do you ever 
think of old Marston ? Of course you do ! 
Belfast says you will never come back ! Can he 
be right ? The thought gives me a pain in the 
heart ! But I don't believe him ! He does'nt 
know what you are made of ! / know you 



442 THE BALTIMORE GUN CLUB. 

like a book ! You are the three blossoms of 
our wonderful nineteenth century. Two of you 
are the embodiments of practical Science and 
practical Industry, as developed in my own 
great country, the young Queen of the New 
World ! The other of you is the embodi- 
ment of practical Art, as fostered in his own 
fair land, the graceful Queen of the Old ! 
You to fail ! I can't believe it. Science is 
immortal. Its votaries are indestructible ! To 
quote lines of my own composition, written a 
few years ago for an address to the Polytechnic 
College of Philadelphia : 

** Empires the proudest vani<=h in a day, 
The rock-ribbed Pyramids confess decay ; 
But what of those hearts that lofty Science trains 
Man to value, not sordid Mammon's gains ? — 
Radiant as yon Stars, they shine while Time remains l" 

Thus did the faithful friend, alternately hoping 
and fearing, patiently watch at his post on the 
lonely peak of the mountains. 



END OF FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON. 



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